Posts tagged Design

Drawing New York City

Via Atlantic Cities:

James Gulliver Hancock wants you to know about a little personal project of his. It’s nothing big, really. Just something he does whenever he has the chance. The project is to draw all 900,000 buildings in New York City. Like we said, nothing major.

Hancock began his epic effort in April of 2010 along with a personal blog where he posted many of the finished works. More than 500 of the buildings in New York that he’s drawn so far were just published in the very appropriately titled book: All the Buildings in New York: That I’ve Drawn So Far (Universe).

Read through for an interview with Hancock. Prints of the drawings are available on Hancock’s web site.

Images: various New York City buildings, by James Gulliver Hancock. 

Pinterest Design Ethos Echoes With Publishers

joshsternberg:

The visual Web continues to push forward, one publisher site at a time.

Publishers across the digital media landscape are redesigning their sites to mimic the photo-friendly grid layout of social sites like Pinterest. Media companies from The New York Times to CNN to Mashable are falling in love with the less-is-more design approach, both as a way to create a better user experience and a route to integrate ads less awkwardly.

“The holy grail is how advertising feels more integrated to the pieces,” said Dan Gardner, co-founder of design shop Code and Theory. “As a page becomes more visual, it allows advertising to feel more integrated. It’s not to confuse what’s advertising and what’s editorial, but advertising can now be more part of the experience.”

That experience is transforming websites. Instead of putting up blocks of text, publishers are understanding that big, bold, beautiful images attract more attention from visitors. The old-fashioned way of presenting information was to offer an inherent hierarchy: news story headlines get bigger treatment, other articles get smaller text. Visual approaches change that.

Click through to read what designers have to say about the Pinterestification of publisher sites.

The Beauty of Letterpress

The Beauty of Letterpress is a new site showcasing the beauty and innovation of letterpress work today in an effort to assist the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum in its move from its current Wisconsin location to a new one.

The site contains image galleries of letterpress examples and will have a monthly design issue curated by designers that highlight their favorite project. The premiere issue is called Form and Function and explores moveable type and the influence modern technology is having on it.

About the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum:

With 1.5 million pieces of wood type and more than 1,000 styles and sizes of patterns, Hamilton’s collection is one of the premier wood type collections in the world. In addition to wood type, the Museum is home to an amazing array of advertising cuts from the 1930s through the 1970s, and all of the equipment necessary to make wood type and print with it, as well as equipment used in the production of hot metal type, tools of the craft and rare type specimen catalogs.

The Hamilton Museum is a non-profit and is looking to raise $250,000 to help move its 30,000 square feet of printing history.

The Panoramic Book

Or, The Horizontal Scroll, depending how you look at things.

Images via the Princeton University Library Blog: “The graphic arts collection holds a scrolling panorama made up of 12 unsigned, hand-colored etchings, with a narrative in verse, attributed to [Thomas] Rowlandson and titled Mister O’Squat.”

The New York Times is redesigning its Web site — starting with the article experience

Gray Lady’s getting a facelift.

Read through and you can see some of the front-end changes they’re making. The majority of it is cleaning up the clutter and bringing more contemporary UI and navigational schemes to the site.

They’re also relocating comments to the side of article articles “so you can read them in context” and bringing the swipe to tablets as a way to go from article to article.

Blah Blah Blah shortformblog: Have to admit, this is a really fresh take on the op-ed headline. Really honest about the contents of the piece. (ht Charles Apple)

Blah Blah Blah

shortformblog:

Have to admit, this is a really fresh take on the op-ed headline. Really honest about the contents of the piece. (ht Charles Apple)

No Sleep ‘Til Fairbanks A few weeks ago EJ Fox wrote a piece for us exploring longform storytelling and adopting magazine experiences for the Web. In it, he discusses how JavaScript and CSS techniques can introduce full screen images and video, parallax effects and responsive design to amplify and support storytelling.  Importantly, he also writes about how producers of these longform pieces must break out from the templates and general style guides that control the rest of their sites. SBNation’s coverage of the Yukon Quest Race is a great, new example of harnessing these techniques. Created with Vox Media, it’s an elegant display of wrapping a 5,500-word longread in a delightful presentation package. Check it: SBNation, No Sleep ‘Til Fairbanks.

No Sleep ‘Til Fairbanks

A few weeks ago EJ Fox wrote a piece for us exploring longform storytelling and adopting magazine experiences for the Web.

In it, he discusses how JavaScript and CSS techniques can introduce full screen images and video, parallax effects and responsive design to amplify and support storytelling. 

Importantly, he also writes about how producers of these longform pieces must break out from the templates and general style guides that control the rest of their sites.

SBNation’s coverage of the Yukon Quest Race is a great, new example of harnessing these techniques. Created with Vox Media, it’s an elegant display of wrapping a 5,500-word longread in a delightful presentation package.

Check it: SBNation, No Sleep ‘Til Fairbanks.

The DRM Chair

Taking the lead from the Digital Rights Management embedded in our music, books and other things made from ones and zeros, Thibault Brevet and friends created the DRM Chair for the latest Deconstruction contest. 

Via Brevet:

The DRM Chair has only a limited number of use before it self-destructs. The number of use was set to 8, so everyone could sit down and enjoy a single time the chair.

A small sensor detects when someone sits and decrements a counter. Every time someone sits up, the chair knocks a number of time to signal how many uses are left. When reaching zero, the self-destruct system is turned on and the structural joints of the chair are melted.

Today’s Front Pages From the Americas

New York Post (bottom center) still keeping it classy.

Images: Via the Newseum. Select to embiggen.

Your Single Page CSS and JavaScript Scrolling Animation for a Cause Site of the Day Every Last Drop is a single page Web site by Waterwise, a UK NGO focused on water issues, to demonstrate how and where you can conserve water on a daily basis. Earlier today we posted on repetition in Web design so count this among the ways to do it better. Our sophisticated internal critique of the site ran something like this: Michael: You want to see something neat. [Sends URL] Jihii: Oh my God, I can’t even take this, it’s so cute. Michael: It’s… Jihii: Oh my God, I love this little man. Sophistication, FJP style. Image: Partial screenshot, Every Last Drop. Select to Embiggen.

Your Single Page CSS and JavaScript Scrolling Animation for a Cause Site of the Day

Every Last Drop is a single page Web site by Waterwise, a UK NGO focused on water issues, to demonstrate how and where you can conserve water on a daily basis.

Earlier today we posted on repetition in Web design so count this among the ways to do it better.

Our sophisticated internal critique of the site ran something like this:

Michael: You want to see something neat. [Sends URL]

Jihii: Oh my God, I can’t even take this, it’s so cute.

Michael: It’s…

Jihii: Oh my God, I love this little man.

Sophistication, FJP style.

Image: Partial screenshot, Every Last Drop. Select to Embiggen.

Every Fucking Web Site The morning PSA. Designers, communicators, marketers and brand strategists: take note. Personal favorite under header number three: “Because we saw three buckets of shit content on our competitor’s front page and we’re god damned if we’re only gonna have two.” — Michael H/T: @lorakolodny 

Every Fucking Web Site

The morning PSA.

Designers, communicators, marketers and brand strategists: take note.

Personal favorite under header number three: “Because we saw three buckets of shit content on our competitor’s front page and we’re god damned if we’re only gonna have two.” — Michael

H/T: @lorakolodny 

90 Years of TIME Magazine Covers in 120 Seconds

via.

No, But Ask Me Again Every Time Via XKCD

No, But Ask Me Again Every Time

Via XKCD

The Magazine Experience on the Web Over on theFJP.org, EJ Fox explores how news organizations are taking advantage of responsive design, CSS and JavaScript techniques not just to make things pretty, but to better tell their stories. For example, he takes a look at the New York Times’ recent and well regarded Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek. As he explores its presentation, he writes: Its graphics and videos stretch to fill the entire browser window, an emerging design trend that is the true successor of the magazine’s full-bleed photos. The Times shows that when you elevate beautiful art that’s telling the story in a seamless way, it becomes greater than the sum of it’s parts. Compare to a similar NYT story where pictures are included with the story, but certainly not featured with any love. It’s not confined to the style of the rest of the NYT site, which is for the most part a static 975px width. Some of the impact of full-bleed pieces like Snow Fall comes from the contrast between those special features and the whitespace of the primary site. It’s a clue to the user to dig in, and that something special is going to happen. Read through for the rest, including how Web presentation and storytelling design affected EJ’s reporting on Occupy Oakland. You can follow EJ on Tumblr at Pseudo Placebo. On Twitter he’s @mrejfox. Image: Screenshot, Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek, via the New York Times. Select to embiggen.

The Magazine Experience on the Web

Over on theFJP.org, EJ Fox explores how news organizations are taking advantage of responsive design, CSS and JavaScript techniques not just to make things pretty, but to better tell their stories.

For example, he takes a look at the New York Times’ recent and well regarded Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek. As he explores its presentation, he writes:

  • Its graphics and videos stretch to fill the entire browser window, an emerging design trend that is the true successor of the magazine’s full-bleed photos. The Times shows that when you elevate beautiful art that’s telling the story in a seamless way, it becomes greater than the sum of it’s parts. Compare to a similar NYT story where pictures are included with the story, but certainly not featured with any love.
  • It’s not confined to the style of the rest of the NYT site, which is for the most part a static 975px width. Some of the impact of full-bleed pieces like Snow Fall comes from the contrast between those special features and the whitespace of the primary site. It’s a clue to the user to dig in, and that something special is going to happen.

Read through for the rest, including how Web presentation and storytelling design affected EJ’s reporting on Occupy Oakland.

You can follow EJ on Tumblr at Pseudo Placebo. On Twitter he’s @mrejfox.

Image: Screenshot, Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek, via the New York Times. Select to embiggen.

thefjp.org