SPD: Interview with Designers at The Knot

Ratings

2 of 5 stars
What’s this?

Paul Schrynemakers talks to Lori Richmond, Design Director of Online Editorial, and Kristen Dudish, Online Designer for the cross-media wedding brand. It’s a nice interview, but I mostly wanted to point out how impressed I am that The Society of Publication Designers, an organization that could easily succumb to the misguided temptation of turning its nose up at digital media, is making a real effort to understand and engage digital audiences. Hats off, particularly, to Paul, who has been writing about Web sites extensively on the organization’s blog.

Jump to this link

+

Print’s Not Dead

Print’s Not Dead

Just a few minutes ago, some of my colleagues noticed a line forming out in front of the Times Building. People are queuing up to buy already scarce copies of today’s newspaper, presumably as mementos of the historic election of Barack Obama to the office of President of the United States. Before shooting this picture from the street, I ran down to a lower floor where I could get a look from overhead and got this picture. People working on that floor hadn’t noticed yet that the line was forming, and when they realized its purpose, a feeling of delight swept over the newsroom like the friendliest wildfire I’d ever seen. Reporters, editors, photographers, everyone started clapping, hooting and hollering that people still find the newspaper valuable enough to wait dozens of people deep in line for their chance to buy a copy.

Update: The Times printed an additional 75,000 copies for sale in key hubs throughout the city.

+

Typography-free Book Covers

Ratings

4 of 5 stars
What’s this?

When grouped together, this trend of omitting the title and author from book covers and deferring to pictorial language for maximum impact seems more trivial than it really is. Several of them are fairly powerful designs though. What’s more, they can be thought of as a kind of response to the text-everywhere environment of digital media: there’s no competing with the Internet for the sheer abundance of words, so marketing the idea behind a book as being so powerful and engrossing that it needs no words is a fairly shrewd strategy. From The Book Design Review, which in case you’re not already reading it, is a very entertaining blog about packaging books.

Jump to this link

+

Standing in Line to Vote

Standing in Line to Vote

Absolutely nothing out of the ordinary happened to me while standing in line to vote in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn this morning. Which is to say, nearly everyone I know waited an hour or more for their turn to cast a ballot (a duration at least five or six times longer than it’s ever taken me to vote in the state of New York in a decade-plus of living here) and so did I.

Happily, the whole process was very orderly and actually quite pleasant. Our local City Council Member, Letitia James, even brought around cookies for the voters as we waited (she was not up for re-election today), and there was a kind of excitement radiating from the whole place. It felt uncommonly satisfying to pull that lever.

+

WP-Hyphenate 1.0 beta

Ratings

2 of 5 stars
What’s this?

Another increment of finer typographic control for the Web: an apparently effective, server-side plug-in for WordPress that enables elegant and automatic hyphenation of words. “The end result is text that can be jusГtiГfied withГout ghastly word spacing.” Supposedly works with left-aligned blocks of text, too. It’s a step forward, but it may not be the full step forward some might hope for. Unfortunately, I don’t use WordPress so I won’t have the opportunity to put it into practice.

Jump to this link

+