Category Archives: design

BBC The Editors: BBC News website redesign

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"In the next week or so, we'll be making some improvements to the design and layout of the BBC News website. ... We are doing this after listening extensively to what our users in the US and Canada have said, and with the backing of the BBC's commercial arm, BBC Worldwide, which funds our online service internationally. And we've done something which will be less obvious to you, but hugely important to the journalists working on the site. We've completely rebuilt the content production system (CPS) which we use to create content and run the site. The new version of the CPS is designed to be easier to use and - crucially when we want to get stories out to you fast - quicker too."

iA: WIRED on iPad: Just like a Paper Tiger…

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First, the paper magazine was crammed into the little iPad frame. To compensate for the lack of interactive logic, this pretty package was provided with a fruity navigation. In the end it was spiced with in-app links, plucked with a couple of movies and salted with audio files (”interactive”). Then it was off to marketing. And it sold 24,000 copies. Dammit. It’s the Nineties all over again. ... Here is a short, evil rundown of how iA sees the new WIRED app. ... Let’s make this clear once and for all: at the current surface and resolution of the iPad, multi column layouts for long screen texts are sentimental nonsense."

Interfacelab: Is This Really The Future of Magazines or Why Didn’t They Just Use HTML 5?

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"The only real differentiation between the Wired application and a multimedia CD-ROM is the delivery mechanism ... what we’ve really ended up with is a glorified slide show. ... I actually think it’s a huge step backwards and I think the wrong people are working on the problem – just like the wrong people were working on the web problem back in the day. ... By the time an article is published in Time, I’ve read six or seven different takes on the same story on the web well before it hits the newsstands. I don’t think that’s a unique or new insight. But now you want me to download 500MB a month just so some print designer can have pixel perfect layouts with custom fonts?"

paidContent:UK: The Timeses Go Back-To-Basics With Print-Centric New Multimedia Sites

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Robert Andrews: "There’s a ballsy desire to map the economics of print-era content publishing on to the new sites, as borne out by refusing to give even excerpts to search engines or users originating from them. Whether you think that’s backward, as some web industry folk will claim, or a necessary reassertion of value in order to save its journalism from pennilessness, as the Timeses say; that’s up to you."

FT.com Tech Blog: Behind the Times’ new paywall

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“'It looks a lot like a newspaper, which I don’t think we’re apologising for,' said Tom Whitwell, assistant editor of the Times. 'The article pages we think are simple and clean, and easy to read.' ... Danny Finkelstein, comment editor of the Times, ... insisted this barrier would not prevent him from sharing links to his articles on Twitter or cut the newspaper out of a wider online conversation. ... The Times’ content will remain tightly locked up with not even a first paragraph to tease in new customers."

Techcrunch: Sports Illustrated Shows Off An HTML5 Magazine

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"Today at Google I/O , Sports Illustrated editor Terry McDonell took the stage to show off a version of the magazine in HTML5. It looked pretty much like SI‘s tablet prototype he showed me last December, except it isn’t an app. It’s all in the browser, with great fonts, big photos, videos, drag-and-drop capability, search, and all the rest."

GigaOm: Is the Mobile Pendulum Swinging From Apps to the Web?

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"Taptu forecast in December of last year that more than 500,000 touch-friendly websites would exist by the end of 2010. According to its latest count, there are 440,100 such sites — an annualized growth rate of 232 percent. In contrast, Apple’s iTunes App Store holds roughly 185,000 software titles, which translates into a 144 percent annual growth rate."

Digital Spy: Welcome to the new-look Digital Spy!

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Neil Wilkes on the redesign of Digital Spy: "Believe it or not, it's been more than four years since the site was last refreshed. During this time an awful lot has changed chez nous: back then, we published around 50 news stories a day, now it's in excess of 250. In 2006, DS had 3 million readers and now we have more than 7.5 million users, reading more than 100 million pages a month between them."

Digital Spy: Welcome to the new-look Digital Spy!

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Neil Wilkes on the redesign of Digital Spy: "Believe it or not, it's been more than four years since the site was last refreshed. During this time an awful lot has changed chez nous: back then, we published around 50 news stories a day, now it's in excess of 250. In 2006, DS had 3 million readers and now we have more than 7.5 million users, reading more than 100 million pages a month between them."

currybetdotnet: News apps on the iPad – my first impressions

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Martin Belam: "I saw some evidence in both the USA Today and New York Times apps that we risk getting so bound up in this myth of replicating the print experience with electronics that we forget the value that networked connectivity gives us. ... As an industry, there is simply no point in us spending the money on building glossy looking apps, paying the 30% Apple tax on sales through iTunes, and then just shoving the same old print content into them. That would be to fail to learn from the mistakes of the 'shovelware' years of the web."