In a week when people are snapping up printed media as personal mementos of an event of a lifetime (I jokingly asked on Twitter why people didn’t just print out a copy of a website), I’d like to make a prediction that you can verify in 50 or so years. The cover of the current issue of The New Yorker will be considered among the best magazine covers of the first half of this century.* (Ironically, another New Yorker cover from the campaign — the Obamas as knuckle-bumping radicals — could also make the cut.) The illustration is titled “Reflection” and was created by Bob Staake. Below is an video Staake created that animates the cover:
*Later: I’ve been asked “why is this cover so great?” so here goes: First, the most daunting challenge a magazine designer and editor face is a cover of an issue when every magazine on the newsstand is going to be featuring the same story. How do you capture the event and moment uniquely? Secondly, an illustrator for the New Yorker has an additional competitive challenge: how to tell this story more dramatically than all of the previous New Yorker covers that appeared following unique historical events.
This cover responds to the challenges on many levels: evoking both Lincoln and Martin Luther King. However, what makes this cover a masterpiece to those who love magazines is its striking awareness of context — this is not merely an illustration: it is a magazine cover and the “O” of the magazine logo is providing the illumination of the story. This, “my friends,” (to quote the losing candidate) is one of those times when genius is an easy label to apply.
Today, Yahoo! announced the release of Fire Eagle, a service that, according to Search Engine Land, “is intended to be something of a ‘clearinghouse’ or ’switchboard’ for location and help users ‘manage location’ across the internet and on mobile applications.”
Those of you who know what this means, raise your hands. Okay. That’s what I thought. Actually, I’m not blogging about what the service does. I’m blogging about Fire Eagle’s logo. I’m outraged! Yahoo! would infringe on the Tennessee Titans’ famed “flaming thumbtack” logo. While I’m sure that Yahoo!’s designer intentionally meant to make their logo look like a flaming thumbtack and with the Titan’s designer’s, it was just good ol’ dumb luck, I still think consumers may be confused by the remarkably similar flaming thumbtack images.
To protest Yahoo!’s blatant disregard for my home team’s copyrighted logo, I have decided that when I attend Titans games, I will not use Fire Eagle to manage my location across the internet and on mobile applications.
Artists Shan Carter and Amanda Cox created the interactive chart in the video I’ve embedded below. (Added later: There is now a permanent spot for the graphic on NYTimes.com: here.) It is appearing this afternoon on the front page of NYTimes.com and interprets exit polling data from the entire Democratic Party presidential primary campaign. My video is a quick screencast (a video screengrab) of me clicking through the tabs of data that are displayed in the graphic. (What I didn’t show was how a cursor-hover reveals data related to each state box.) I believe it’s an impressive (dazzling) use of subtle interactive-animation and information design that effectively translates a mountain of incomprehensible data into an understandable statistical narrative. I’m especially struck by the way the NYTimes artists eschewed colors and relied on the animation and the relative placement of data to interpret the statistics. For a chart junkie (I confess), I’m impressed that it is strongly visual, yet at the same time, is very “un” info-graphic. This is serious information design porn, in other words. (For future readers, today is the last day of the marathon 2008 Democratic Party presidential primary campaign.)
Credits that appeared with the graphic: Source: Edison/Mitofsky exit poll Design: Shan Carter and Amanda Cox
Actually, I think you could ask Khoi Vinh a question anytime and you’d get an answer, but this week, you can ask him a question and he’ll answer it as part of the NYTimes.com’s “Talk to the Newsroom” feature. Khoi is NYTimes.com design director. And he’s a really, really smart guy. He loves Helvetica, also.
A few months ago, I told a group of marketers that the reason some people have difficulty understanding social media is the baggage some bring from other media when trying to understand how “digital natives” experience the web. “Your metaphors suck,” is perhaps the only thing I said that day they all can remember. Specifically, I noted that the metaphor of “a page” that we’ve brought from print to the web is a tremendous burden in trying to comprehend the “live” nature of the web — that the web is a place, not a thing.
In his typically insightful and eloquent way, NYTimes.com design director Khoi Vinh today explains how the term page “burdens the digital page with the false expectation that it will share many similarities with a printed page, where a more accurate term might clean the slate.” This, he says, can be a challenge for the designer, as well as the reader or user.
Quote:
“A Web page and a printed page are so materially different from one another that it’s almost ridiculous to use the same terminology to describe them. It’s nearly as counter-intuitive as using the terms ‘episode’ (for a television show) and ‘issue’ (for a magazine) interchangeably. When Web designers think of a page, we tend to understand that it’s a page in name only, and that in fact its true nature is as a container for content, features and behaviors. But the idea of a page has such a deeply rooted connotation in centuries of printed matter that Web novices tend to think of Web pages as simply finite blocks of text and images, with functionality and interactions as only superficial garnishes.
Khoi (nor I, for that matter) is not suggesting the word “web page” be replaced — obviously, it is here to stay. However, there is no reason designers (or the rest of us) need to apply the metaphors of the physical page to the digital one.
(Sidenote: I won’t point to it, but I long-ago grappled with the “episode” metaphor as it relates to magazines. In some ways, thinking of a magazine as “episodic journalism” can be a helpful metaphor for editors and designers trying to understand both the constraints and opportunities of regularly publishing something that reassures the reader with its consistency while surprising the reader with its freshness. Another metaphor for another day.)
“Over the last several years, many publishers have convinced themselves that breaking up stories into sometimes as many as ten pages is an acceptable way to present content on the web. The realistic ones at least admit that it’s a cheap way to boost stats. The disingenuous (or naive) ones actually posit that they are improving readability and usability for their audiences by reducing scrolling. Because scrolling is so hard.”
I saw this via Rex Sorgatz, who says he isn’t bothered by it. “I’ve just always been willing to find the ‘print’ button,” he says. My problem with the “slide-show” version of this page-view juicing hack (the even-more-evil cousin of the pagination hack) is that there’s no “print” button. Question to Rex S: Do you include list slide shows in your year-end list of lists?”
And the Oscar for best redesign of a website I thought would never be redesigned goes to Internet Movie Data Base. You may not notice the redesign on the front of the site, but the new look and structure is very apparent on an interior page like this: Scent of a Woman (1992). What’s next? A new look for Craigslist?
Just heard an interesting piece on Studio 360 (audio) in which graphic designer Michael Bierut discusses something easily observed driving down any street in America this week: why all the campaign signs look the same, no matter what the political side of the fence the candidate is on. I have been involved in designing at least one campaign’s graphics and, yes, they were a variation of Beirut’s observation. He doesn’t mention Jimmy Carter, but Carter’s campaign for President broke the mold: instead of being red, blue and white, he used white reversed from a field of green. During the 2004 Presidential campaign, Virginia Postrel, a writer who ponders (among other things) the role of design in our lives, blogged on the the role of graphic design in that campaign. Here’s how she summed it up:
“…the logos graphically express what political scientists call ‘median voter theory.’ In a two-party system like ours — mathematically, the constitutional arrangement leads to two parties, no matter how much alternatives squawk — candidates will crowd the middle, the better to attract as many votes as possible. When designing a logo to attract 50 percent plus one, the most important thing is not to alienate people, and you can’t go wrong with red, white, and blue.”
Today, Yahoo! 
Just heard 
