design

If I could think of one word to describe the changes with Ebony in the last few years, it would be evolutionary.

In 2009, the magazine’s parent company Johnson Publishing Company (JPC) was rumored to be on the verge of financial collapse. In 2010, JPC sold their historic Chicago headquarters, named Amy DuBois Barnett as editor-in-chief, launched an iPad app to celebrate their 65th anniversary, and hired former White House Social Secretary Desirée Rogers as CEO of JPC. 2011 marked more big changes for Ebony, including releasing another iPad app, appointing Kierna Mayo as editorial director, digital, and tapping former ESQUIRE art director Darhil Crooks to completely revamp the print magazine’s design from cover-to-cover. (Crooks is now Creative Director at Ebony.)

Now, Ebony has debuted their new website redesign which complements and strengthens the magazine’s visual theme while bringing the brand into the 21st century.

Read more

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You may remember when designer Andy Rutledge challenged The New York Times to rethink its news design approach by proposing his own innovative design (and the stir it caused on Twitter). Now that design is a reality thanks to WooThemes, the premium WordPress theme developers, who purchased the rights to his design and released it as a theme called Currents.

A few features of the design:

• Fully responsive design. This means that no matter the browser size or device, the design adapts to the screen to give users the optimum visual experience. Read more about The Boston Globe’s implementation of this concept.
• Featured posts slider. A rotating slider to highlight your best content.
• Big, beautiful story photos. At the story level, photos are displayed full width.
• Custom news areas. Recent news, featured category, related news.
• Author profiles. In a design tailored toward publishers, Woo Themes developers say they’ve , “put an extra effort in to make it easy to have multiple authors, with a custom author page template and custom author widget.” Author pages come baked with social features, too! Read more

Newspapers are good at throwing share buttons and sidebars and embedded widgets and image carousels and lists of related items into their story pages online. News design isn’t pretty, and the consumption experience online is often distracting and disjointed if you’re not using an RSS reader.

Now there’s a new tool that wants to fix that by “de-templatizing” news design. It’s called Scroll, and its brought to us by familiar faces Kate Ray and Cody Brown, who also created Nerd Collider and Kommons. Read more

Who doesn’t love a good infographic?

When done well, they concisely present information in a way no narrative story could, helping you see comparison and draw conclusions you wouldn’t be able to pinpoint on your own. But when they’re done poorly, or worse unnecessarily, they muddle information for the sake of being an infographic.

The goal of a designer is to make information more accessible and readable, whether it’s by choosing the perfect font to convey a mood, layout to draw readers through, or graph to show off data as only graphs can do. But when unprecedented amounts of data and graphics software fall into the hands of the masses, color and quantity sometimes trump care and quality.

Grace Dobush at HOW Interactive Design is on a campaign to stop the madness. In her post, Quit it With All the Infographics Already, she points out several good reasons to think before inking an infographic, including:

 
• Most infographics aren’t accessible for the visually impaired.
• Most infographics aren’t search-engine optimized.
• Those super-long infographics are practically useless on a mobile device.
• Of all online infographics, 89% contain statistics of dubious veracity. (Err, percentage is madeup, which is sort of her point.)
• Many infographics are just plain bad.

That’s not to say there aren’t reasons to use graphics. There are plenty of awesome graphical stories on news sites and blogs today. 10,000 Words highlights them often. But just because you can, doesn’t mean you need to go graphic goofy.

You should go read the rest of the post to get more background on those valid points, and to get HOW Magazine’s pointers on how to avoid falling into the infographic trap and responsibly create them.

(The image on this post, by the way, comes from Indexed, a comic of sorts drawn on index cards and using only charts. I’m not saying the charts are bad, but I’ll admit I’ve scratched my head in confusion at a few of them.)