Redesigning the NY Times
Out of context: Reply #20
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- mikotondria30
I think that the aesthetic of the newspaper experience is going to be with us in some form or another for a good long time yet. He's really comparing apples and oranges I think; to transfer a newspaper from one medium to another, brand and audience is like turning an oil tanker at sea. People, myself included, don't mind what would be perceived as 'clutter' on other sites. We have 30 years of picking up a visually crowded newspaper and scanning, scanning, preplanning what to read, scoping the leads, grazing past the snippets at high speed, and eventually settling down on the page like a nervous bird finding a perch in a tree. Once we've landed, we'll cruise with one eye on one place and another roving - it's a well-honed experience we're familiar with, that we learned as children, and ultimately it's a demographic undercurrent that will the brake on the change of newspapers' online style.
Magazines were always more diverse and cutting edge in terms of their layout. Many more page-turns for less content meant different ways to bring focus and pump the information at people and so it's this style of browsing that lent itself to the screen more easily.
We've already seen so much experimentation and diversity in the layout of sites over the last 15 years, most of us have been responsible for the inception and production of some of the less popular and less successful phenotypes. It will all trend the same way and in a few years the newspapers will look more like this redesign than they do currently, but there is still so much momentum behind brands and the user expectations that it's going to be a long time coming and by dint of the fact that so much time and money will be acting up the design, it'll be far more effective than either.