Can Design Save Newspapers?

So asks Jacek Utko at this year's TED conference.

Grimm Infographics

It's not a typo - it's Little Red Riding Hood done as a Flash infographic.

UNC Students in Tierra del Fuego

South of Here is a collection of multimedia pieces produced by students from the University of North Carolina School of Journalism and Mass Communication and the Facultad de Communicaciòn at the Universidad de los Andes in Santidago, Chile. 

An interesting mix of storytelling - audio slide shows, videos and Flash animations. 

The Power of True Multimedia

This ... this ... this is what multimedia can do so well. 

The New York Times, the Gray Lady, has put together a nearly 14-minute long tour-de-force looking at the presidential campaign. It is a stunning combination of photos, videos, audio, graphics and narrations. 

It is a complete package. 

How complete? Pay attention to the "Related Links" box below the main screen It changes throughout, offering up links to other stories the Times has done. But look closely - you can click right now and away from the may piece, or you can save them for later and watch them AFTER you're done with the main piece. 

And that is brilliant conceptual storytelling, the melding of the push and pull formats in journalism. 

Visualization Lab

The New York Times has a new subsection that lets you look at news stories visually. I could lose days on this ... 

Sun-Sentinel Redesign

Wow ... this is ... different ... 

Images of the newly-redesigned paper are available on the VisualEditors site, and they are a departure from almost everything I've ever seen in a newspaper. 

Will have to follow this closely ...

Fonts Personified

Okay, this is kind of geeky and really only the hard-core designers will like it, but ... it is funny.

Cover Shots

Khoi Vinh has a marvelous post up talking about album cover artwork. If you read through the comments, an interesting idea is pushed out ... that newer records need to rely on bolder designs that are readable at a smaller scale. And not just because we've moved from albums to CDs, but that we've now moved down to that little square in the corner of iTunes.

I admit to still having a sizable record collection - the big ones with black vinyl inside. I'll even admit to having turned a few of my favorite album covers into home-made posters when I was younger, including The Del Fuegos' Boston, Mass. and Foreigner's Agent Provocateur. Why? They were clean and evocative of ... well, whatever I was feeling in 1986, I suppose.

(Plus, who else but Dan Zanes could pen a line like, "I stayed awake last week ...?")

Wicked Awesome Primary Results Map

Damon Kiesow up at the Nashua Telegraph tweeted this a few moments ago: it's an interactive map of Indiana with county-by-county results from Tuesday's presidential primary.

How cool is that?

Strange Crops

I have been reading newspapers for 30 years now, on and off. I started with the comics, then moved to news and features. And I read the sports pages, but I admit to not being a huge sports fan.

I've worked for small news papers and mid-sized newspapers. I've shot photos, edited photos and done some page layout. Wrote a story or two, too.

I even got to witness the Society for Newspaper Design do its annual judging, which was very cool.

But I've never seen a page design - in a daily newspaper - quite like this.

A trapezoidal crop? A triangular ad?

WooWho!! The Red & Black Goes Multimedia in a Big Way

They have dabbled, they have played. They have experimented.

Now, they've figured out some stuff ...

In Wednesday's edition, they broke a story about a faculty member with a history of sexual harassment charges having been filed against him, dating back almost 20 years. They also created an infographic timeline that ran on page one. Online they posted the documents they collected during their reporting.

In Thursday's edition, they reported on a meeting with university officials. And they included a link to the audio they recorded along the right hand side (below the photo). And they posted a video of student responses to the issue.

So, let's sum this up: They reported the story and then presented their readers with a series of "traditional" text stories, an infographic, the original source documentation, audio from a follow-up meeting with officials and a video of student responses.

There was a lot of thinking going on with this and this is a nice model of how to bring multiple tools to bear on a story.

Motion Graphics Talk - Wednesday Night

From David Hazinski in Broadcast, something to think about going to. Meaning, GO!!

Motion graphics workshop Wednesday night in the photo lab, room 130. Unless we get too many people, then we'll probably move to the newsroom.

My classes had asked for 'more' on motion graphics, so I set this up... then invited Mark Wright. Mark has been the chief graphics designer for CNN. He now holds the same job at CNN International. Runs a crew of about a dozen folks I think who create all the graphics for them and is also responsible for creating the new, clean look they've had for about nine months. Mark says he's also bring a UGA grad who works for him, but I don't know who he or she is.

The original idea was to give students some "hands on" in creating simple screen grabs, backgrounds and "read on" full screens. It will also now morph to whatever Mark wants to explain and as much hands on as we can accomplish.

Burning Man 2007

The Las Vegas Sun has videos - and Flickr photo feed - up from this year's Burning Man festival. This goes well beyond what a "normal" broadcast station would do on this type of story - it has the traditional journalistic narrator, as well as interviews, but adds text and stop-motion style photography to the package.

It's smooth, sophisticated - and integrates well. You have videos, slide shows, maps, panoramas and blog posts, all collected together.

Type Show

Didn't see anything about this until today ...

The Broad Street Gallery in Athens has a show up called "Snap to Grid," on Brett MacFadden's experimental typography.

Show runs through Sept. 28, I'm going to wander over there soon ...

Color Tests

We should talk about color theory in class a lot more than we do, I keep trying to get it in there and it just keeps slipping by. So in its place, here's a small online game for looking at color gradations. See how you do.

(Slightly) Off the Grid

But only slightly.

Over on Subtraction.com, Khoi Vinh talks about web design and the grid - and bumping off of it ever so slightly. For those coming out of the recent graphic design Maymester class, take a look at how he uses the grid to design his web site. Look familiar?