This week I am choosing to highlight and article by Brian Veseling originally published on the IFRA website.
“Learning from old media” explores news website design strategies that have been drawn from the page layout techniques of newspapers of yesteryear. The author discusses creating dramatic headlines, highlighting the best elements of each article, organizing information around hierarchies of value, and bundling ‘packages’ of related content. There are many scans and screen shots illustrating both the contempoarary and historic application of these techniques.
This is interesting stuff for those of us who are frequent users of online news sources. It also offers something of a “mirror image” on our project to convert historic papers to new media digital formats. I was fascinated to learn how old tricks of the typesetters’ trade continue to have relevance in how news gets disseminated via cutting-edge technology, as well as an ongoing impact upon our perceptions of the information that is presented to us.
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