Lone Gunman

Ear­lier this year Swiss news­pa­per Tages-Anzeiger asked Infor­ma­tion Archi­tects, a Japanese-Swiss UX–ori­ented web design agency, to come up with a pitch for a redesign of their offline news­pa­per.

The result is a con­cept and set of designs that are sub­tle re-workings of what works for print, inte­grated with what works online.

The con­cept was: Use all knowl­edge from con­tem­po­rary user expe­ri­ence design and trans­late it to paper. Make the paper more usable, think cross media instead of sep­a­rate media, while using the strength of the paper (pic­tures, info graph­ics, nice text) to the max. Keep the look as close as pos­si­ble to the orig­i­nal brand and change the guts of the design. Make a prod­uct that peo­ple want to buy because it is more usable that the com­peti­tor, not because it wins graphic design prices.

Basic rule: Ignore all rules of news­pa­per design to start with and keep only the ones that are use­ful to the reader:

1. Opti­mize text for reading.
2. Reduc­tion to two fonts.
3. Scannabil­ity and print link.
4. Order.
5. Four columns for soft news, five columns for hard news, mixed 4/5 columns for sports. Ragged text for opinion.
6. Big pic­tures, big info graph­ics, use the strength of the paper medium.

I am reminded of two instances where large infor­ma­tion visu­al­i­sa­tions were promi­nent on the front page of news­pa­pers: The Inde­pen­dent’s Mid­dle East cease­fire info­graphic and a Her­ald graphic depict­ing Washington’s $2 bil­lion bud­get deficit. It works.

via @mocost

Update: I knew I had seen this before and knew I hadn’t writ­ten about it here on Lone Gun­man before. How­ever, thanks must go to Andrew Smith for point­ing out in the com­ments that it was posted here pre­vi­ously: by the eru­dite Andrew Simone in his guest post, News­pa­per.

With the blogs of Dustin Cur­tis, Gre­gory Wood and Jason Santa Maria as exam­ples (each wor­thy of your time, by the way), Smash­ing Mag­a­zine looks at blogs designed like mag­a­zines,* dis­cussing what these ‘blogazines’ mean for the future of bor­ing blog posts.

Dustin Cur­tis had this to say on the draw­backs of design­ing like this on the web:

The biggest dis­ad­van­tage is that CSS and HTML are ter­ri­ble tech­nolo­gies that weren’t designed for page lay­out. They were designed for struc­tured con­tent pre­sen­ta­tion, like for a news­pa­per, where all the ele­ments through­out the web­site are the same and are re-used. But I’m try­ing to make a mag­a­zine, where the con­tent and pre­sen­ta­tion are inex­tri­ca­bly mixed and unique.

* A blog where each post is unique in terms of design and pre­sen­ta­tion, and where the con­tent and design are one and the same.

via @mocost

If you didn’t already know, Mal­colm Gladwell’s lat­est book, What the Dog Saw, is a col­lec­tion of his best essays as pub­lished in The New Yorker (all of which are avail­able on his site for free, if you pre­fer to read them there).

Since its pub­li­ca­tion, jour­nal­ists and sci­en­tists have been crit­i­cis­ing Glad­well over what they per­ceive as his lack of sci­en­tific integrity (in pre­fer­ring folk wis­dom and over-simplifications than fully-researched sci­ence journalism).

The most high pro­file of these crit­i­cisms, and the one that seems to have struck a nerve with Glad­well, comes from cog­ni­tive sci­en­tist and author Steven Pinker.

If you want to read more about these crit­i­cisms, Seed sum­marises many of them in an arti­cle that looks evenly at the var­i­ous dis­agree­ments and looks at how, in pop­u­lar sci­ence writ­ing, “where sta­tis­ti­cal rigor is actu­ally applied, it takes the dis­cus­sion to a level of abstrac­tion that is not use­ful to the aver­age reader”.

How­ever I felt the most con­cise and unbi­ased con­clu­sion comes from Mind Hacks:

While the two writ­ers spar over the details, the sub­text is that Pinker is a pro­po­nent of IQ being a reli­able pre­dic­tor of suc­cess with a sig­nif­i­cant genetic influ­ence (see The Blank Slate) whereas Glad­well has argued that suc­cess is largely a com­bi­na­tion of prac­tice plus being in the right place at the right time (see Out­liers).

Obvi­ously these two approaches to explain­ing suc­cess don’t sit well with each other, hence, in part, the disagreement.

With a pub­lic dis­trust of sci­en­tists comes the idea that “no sci­en­tific evi­dence will ever be com­pelling”. That’s what we can learn from Cre­ation­ism, says Andrew Brown, and to solve this dis­trust we can­not rely on edu­ca­tion to help the next gen­er­a­tion under­stand, but instead we must improve sci­ence jour­nal­ism.

I’m not sure what the answer is, but rea­son­ably cer­tain that it isn’t the pub­lic under­stand­ing of sci­ence as most sci­en­tists under­stand that. What they mean by this is teach­ing peo­ple to think more or less as sci­en­tists do about the world. That’s admirable in itself: rea­son­able numer­acy, and some knowl­edge of sta­tis­tics and of prob­a­bil­ity, would hugely improve almost everyone’s life. But it won’t solve the under­ly­ing prob­lem of trust.

via The Browser

The inverted pyra­mid style of reportage is bro­ken, believes Jason Fry, and it is time to rein­vent con­text­less report­ing into a more reader-friendly style.

Fry points to an essen­tial Nie­man Reports essay that sug­gests how context-central report­ing could be the future of report­ing and a rea­son why Wikipedia is becom­ing the des­ti­na­tion of choice for those want­ing to be informed on cur­rent events.

Ed Yong pro­vides a good sum­mary, intro­duc­ing it with:

News jour­nal­ism relies on a tried-and-tested model of inverted sto­ry­telling. Con­trary to the introduction-middle-end style of writ­ing that per­vades school essays and sci­en­tific papers, most news sto­ries shove all the key facts into the first para­graphs, leav­ing the rest of the prose to present back­ground, details and other para­pher­na­lia in descend­ing order of impor­tance. The idea behind this inverted pyra­mid is that a story can be short­ened by what­ever degree with­out los­ing what are pre­sumed to be the key facts.

But recently, sev­eral writ­ers have argued that this model is out­dated and needs to give way to a new sys­tem where con­text is king.

via @siibo