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In an article for weave magazine, we’re exploring what the future of news and digital editorial design could look like.
We wrote an 8-pages article for the current issue of German magazine weave (02.2010), exploring what the future of news and magazines could look like. We’re presenting different innovative approaches to journalistic user interfaces, multimedia storytelling, data visualization and glance at the topic of tablet computers such as Apple’s iPad as a new platform for digital editorial design.
One of the four covers of weave, issue 02.2010
In this context we interviewed Nick Bilton of New York Times‘ Bits Blog, Chris Lüscher of Information Architects, Wolfgang Blau, editor in chief of Zeit Online and Mario Garcia.
As a new addition to our rather sporadic interview series, we’re going to publish the full length interview with Mario Garcia, one of the world’s most renowned newspaper designers, here on our weblog next week (in English).
Erratum: In der Autorenbox zum Artikel wurden die Angaben zu “Er könnte gerne” vertauscht. Johannes kann sehr gut verzichten und schläft auch nie beim Fernsehen ein. Programmieren würden beide gerne können. Schreinern fände Christophe auch nicht schlecht.
The successor on visualizing information in Graphic Design – with text features and interviews by precious.
© onlab.ch
We’re in love with data visualization – and we love to explore the great controversial field between scientific approach and artistic visual output. Is it useful, does it generate insight – or does the visual impact override any meaning?
So it was great honor and delight when Gestalten approached us last September and asked if we’d liked to contribute some text features to Data Flow 2, the successor to Data Flow – Visualising Information in Graphic Design from 2008.
Johannes wrote the preface, chapter Introductions and conducted interviews with The New York Times’s Graphics Director Steve Duenes, Andre Vande Moere of infosthetics.com, Visualcomplexity’s Manuel Lima, Joachim Sauter of ART+COM as well as cartographer Menno-Jan Kraak.
The book was designed and co-edited by onlab (go there and see some of the beautiful page spreads). we make money not art wrote a convincing review. Order the book at Amazon (affiliate link).
New “work” from us featured in German newspaper “Welt am Sonntag”.
Rolling Stone Magazine and German newspaper Welt am Sonntag asked us to design a cover for the most discussed CD in Germany.
No, I’m not talking about the new Tocotronic album, which entered the German charts at number 1 this week (we already designed that cover). There is another CD which gets even more press these days: The “Steuersünder”-CD, which contains data of 1500 people who commited tax fraud by stashing away some million Euro in Swiss bank accounts.
Above is our proposal. Below our “Artist Statement” (in German):
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Some more critical thoughts regarding the ongoing hype around tablet computers.
Some days ago, I wrote a post compiling some concept videos for Tablet Computing I found interesting and exciting. Still, I can get pretty euphoric about the hype and especially for designers interested in newspaper and magazine design, no matter how diffuse and indefinite things still are at present, it could become a very promising platform to keep up with.
If there’s going to be hardware from players like Apple and Google, this will definitely lift handheld computing and touch interaction to the next level and leverage mainstream adoption – with the potential to heavily influence how readers are consuming digital content.
But nevertheless, as with any kind of hype, we should not forget to take a look at some drawbacks. So, in addtion to these really exciting videos from the last post, here’s a collection of some more critical aspects, summarizing different thoughts I found on the internets during the last couple of days.
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Three commented examples of what Tablet Computers could look like in the near future.
So it looks like 2010 will be the year of Tablet Computers and E-Readers. The rumors about an upcoming new Apple device keep on spreading, large publishing houses are already presenting concepts and prototypes. Whenever and whatever exactly happens, it will definitely speed up the process of mobile overtaking desktop usage.
We have compiled and commented three promising concepts.
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Some notes and a line graph regarding the website for German rock band Tocotronic.
The ecosystem of a rock band (or any kind of active musician or artist) drawn as a line graph looks something like this:
When you’re working on a band website, you have to take this into account. A strategy you can see quite often is separating a regular artist website from temporary promotional microsites supporting record releases. Sometimes it’s just news on band sites, pointing to an external URL somewhere on the label’s website. And sometimes, artist websites change radically from release to release.
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