What I learned from the news designers, Part 1

I spent Friday and Saturday at the Society for News Design’s annual workshop, held this year in Orlando, Florida. The members of SND include graphic artists, page designers, and photo editors, among others. Sessions at the workshop covered a wide range of topics.

Robin Sloan of Current TV and Matt Thomson of the Star Tribune gave the keynote Friday morning, showing their world-famous EPIC 2015 movie, enhanced afterward by a list of 10 things all journalists need to know today:

1. Your audience needs to be your co-author. Or rather, you need your audience to be your co-author(s). Example: Paris riots on Flickr.
2. Stories must be designed to grow over time.
3. Design each story to be understood in 10 seconds or less. Example: Gapminder (the big red dot is China).
4. Your story is a spreadsheet.
5. Design each story to (allow it to) be used in different ways by different people.
6. Don’t just design a story. Design a tool. The now classic example: Chicago Crime.
7. Make a story we can play. Almost no one ever does this. But I hope we will get there someday. Example: UN Food Force.
8. Embrace complexity. The audience can handle shades of gray. They know the world is not explainable in simple black and white. Example: They Rule.
9. Embrace ugly. (I hate this advice, but Matt and Robin make a good argument.) Their examples include MySpace and del.icio.us. They don’t mean ugly for ugly’s sake, but rather, chaotic is ugly. From chaos, beauty sometimes rises. Like fractal designs (remember them?), folksonomies generate order and usable patterns if they are allowed to grow.
10. Realize the power of links. You might think that’s ridiculously obvious, but in the news business, plenty of people still don’t get it. (Amy Gahran blogged about this last week.)

When Will We Show Some Love for the Online?

Next, I heard David Kordalski of The Plain Dealer explain how he transformed that newspaper’s visual identity without (a) firing all the designers, or (b) hiring lots of new designers. I can’t say he really gave a blueprint for managing change, but he did show great examples. Their Web site is okay, but he never mentioned a single thing about the Web.

The Designers’ Code of Ethical Standards

SND’s brand-new Code of Ethical Standards was unveiled and discussed at length at a luncheon. This was very, very cool because they showed us excellent videos of experienced news designers talking about why these standards matter so much to all of us. Accuracy. Honesty. Fairness. Inclusiveness. Courage. It is shorter than the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics and, in my opinion, clearer.

I hope SND will make the ethics videos available on the SND Web site! They would be GREAT for stimulating classroom discussions!

I went to three presentations after lunch.

Modular, Portable, Readable, Usable

Josh Awtry of The Salt Lake Tribune evangelized about layered content and nonlinear storytelling. And no — he WAS NOT talking about the Web! He applies to broadsheet newspaper story presentation all of the principles that need to be applied to larger interactive story packages online (break-out boxes, non-redundant information, visuals that help tell the story, lists, intelligent subheads). Even better, he explained in detail how to get buy-in from the reporters!

Too bad you won’t see any of Awtry’s ideas in use on his paper’s Web site, which is locked into a hideous Media News Group template.

Getting Started with 3-D Illustration

Layne Smith from The Dallas Morning News talked about Lightwave for creating 3-D information graphics. Some people in the audience thought Smith did too much of a sales pitch for Lightwave. I didn’t hear it that way. He showed us lots of examples from various newspapers that use 3-D illustrations in their print product. What he said about how you go about learning to use a program such as Lightwave was true of all 3-D programs, and also of Flash and even Photoshop. The gist: It’s hard for all of us. It’s not easy for anybody. And it takes time. So if you want to do it, get all those ideas about “quick” and “simple” out of your head — and then sit down and start learning!

What I got out of this was a clear message that when your illustration work or your information graphics will be used on multiple platforms — print and online, or TV and online, or print and TV — then you will actually SAVE TIME by creating certain graphics in a 3-D program. I have wondered about this because after dabbling with a couple of 3-D applications, I know it would not only take a long time to learn how to use one, but also it would take a long time to produce a graphic even if I were good at using the program.

Now I understand where the efficiency comes in: After you have painstakingly constructed your 3-D object, you have a zillion ways to animate it, reposition it, relight it, etc. — and you can export all of those images as stills, or animations, at any resolution, and at any frame rate. You cannot do that with a 2-D illustration, no matter how many layers you build in.

Smith runs the NAO forums online, where you can find lots more information about Lightwave for news art.

Stuff Your Editors Will Hate: The Sequel

The last session I went to on Friday was by Harris Siegel from the Asbury Park Press. Everyone in the audience seemed to enjoy the presentation a lot, but the problem for me was that nothing he showed us was journalism. It was all fluff for the lifestyle section or the Press’s upscale glossy magazine that’s distributed only to the very wealthy people in the community — fashion shoots and man-on-the-street fluff about what famous person you would date if you could and other useless stuff. It was all very creative and pretty, but of little value to readers. I enjoyed the flash and energy as much as everyone else in the room, but I was disappointed in the content.

Update (Sept. 5): Danny Sanchez at Journalistopia posted a good summary of Scott Horner’s Friday morning session, “Beyond Flash: Taking Print Graphics Online.”

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