Simon is a digital designer with experience in both visual design and front-end development.
He is currently the art director of a major Australian news website, leading the design and front-end development teams. Prior to working in mainstream media, Simon ran a web design and development company in Perth, Western Australia, working with clients ranging from small business to government and publicly listed companies.
An interesting take on skimming and browsing behaviours online, the Times Skimmer is now live on the main New York Times website. In the final release they’ve added the typeface Cheltenham—familiar to readers of their print edition—to the app using Typekit along with sponsorship from Blackberry, adding the commercial aspect noticeably absent in the test version I wrote about earlier. It’s a polished evolution of the idea, very well executed.
“Great design is serious (not solemn),” says Paula Scher, a New York based partner at design firm Pentagram. She argues that you do your best work when you’re having fun, exploring and not pressured by expectations.
I find the key is finding somewhere in between: creative work needs a combination of space and freedom but also a clear problem to solve.
Need more Paula Scher? Hillman Curtis has a video discussing type as image that’s also worth watching.
For those who missed Wired magazine creative director Scott Dadich’s inspiring presentation at Semi-Permanent Sydney earlier this year, he gave a similar talk to design company IDEO covering everything from photo shoots to commissioning typefaces. There’s more follow-up reading with plenty of pictures at a photo editor and eye blog.
Design agency CX Partners leans on 6 years of user testing to declare that “the fold” is dead: users don’t mind scrolling. More than anything else, this highlights the importance of getting the first ‘fold’ worth of your pages, especially as more users land on pages from search results and make snap judgements of whether to read a page at all, or simply click back to their search results.
What’s really remarkable about Strange Light — Derek Powazek’s magazine featuring photography of the Sydney dust storms — is that it was conceived, produced and made available for purchase by one person within two days of the events it documents. Tapping into flickr’s social reach and Magcloud’s on-demand printing and distribution, this is a glimpse into one possible low-cost and community-focused future of magazines.
Documentaries are no longer passive experiences that viewers sit back and watch from start to finish. New approaches are making the user an active a participant and using alternate forms of navigation to add more context to stories.
Design magazine Core77 have a new feature, Hack 2 Work, offering real-world advice from a bunch of great designers. Some highlights include Pentagram’s Michael Bierut on making the logo bigger and dealing with businesses right through to ergonomics when working with laptops.
Apple have quietly switched the default gamma setting in Snow Leopard from 1.8 — their default for the last 25 years and originally set to match their first laser printer — to the slightly darker gamma of 2.2, which is the default in Windows. John Nack at Adobe has a good write-up on gamma and what’s changing.
Google are playing good PR with big news publishers by offering up some detail to explain the crawlers and algorithms that drive their Google News offering, including a 15 minute video. Their tips are mostly existing best practice, but it’ll be interesting to see if this shapes story page layouts in a future where search referrals will play a large part in attracting users.
MSNBC have published a behind the scenes video of the history and process behind their Week in Pictures gallery, a weekly wrap-up of the best in photojournalism. It’s well worth watching to get a sense of the the amount of editing work involved in producing the galleries. There’s also a brief cameo from Tom Kennedy, multimedia editor at washingtonpost.com.
Finding reliable data is often one of the hardest parts of large visualisation projects, so news that “computational knowledge engine” Wolfram Alpha are to open up their datasets through an API is a welcome development. Wolfram Alpha disappeared from the news as it became clear they’re not a rival to Google (in either’s current form at least) but offering an open API should bring a new range of mashups and visualisations by other developers tapping into the range of structured data available, such as astronomy, weather and finance.
When a news story is centred around a list, it’s hard to make your coverage stand out. That’s the problem we faced when Triple J ran their Hottest 100 of All Time earlier this year. Given everyone had the same list of one hundred songs, how do you add your own angle?
After the comparison of logo evolutions of Coca-Cola and Pepsi, Businessweek’s profile on Coke’s ‘Creative Excellence’ department makes interesting reading, particularly where it covers the internal battles of their startlingly simple packaging redesign. They seem to be sticking with the simple packaging too: witness their summer-themed cans.
Print magazine talks to eight book cover designers about rejected designs, including this quote from Gabriele Wilson which every designer will identify with: “Editors sometimes need to see what doesn’t work, in order to figure out what does work.”
Photographer Peter Belanger’s timelapse video of creating a Macworld magazine cover is mesmerising to watch, and reveals just how much effort goes into the seemingly simple cover photo. Think of it as the photography equivalent to Mike Kus’ slide design time lapse video, which tracked the process of designing a presentation earlier this year.
Michael Sokolove’s article “What’s a Big City Without a Newspaper?” in the New York Times Magazine tells the situation facing the US newspaper industry through the story of Philidelphia’s own papers, including the possible ignominy of being the first major US city without a daily paper.
Once a morning ritual and read over breakfast or on the commute to work, newspapers have found their “what’s happening today?” role replaced by websites and tv networks offering a continuous stream of news for free. How are they adjusting to this shifting demand?
Mumbrella has the numbers from Nielsen’s latest stats for the time users spend on media websites in Australia (and also the US). The numbers aren’t entirely surprising, but it’s still interesting to see.
As part of their Open Government Initiative, the US government have launched data.gov, a website to provide access to datasets they produce. Combined with services like ManyEyes, this should be interesting to watch.
BBH Labs’ talks to Times Media Group about their redesign of The Times in 2007. Their prototyping with “Project Victoria” is a great approach to testing out new systems if you can afford it.