"And into our lives comes Web design..."
Joy Mayer, design editor for the Columbia Missourian.
By Joy Mayer
Print design for me is about inspiration.
A story about an artist inspires me to capture the tone, the movement, the essence of his art. I work carefully with typography, with color, with space, hoping a reader will be intrigued enough to engage.
I’m inspired by an election and want to know every detail. In print, I can capture the drama and scope, from the size of the headline to just the right pullquote to the scannable results from each race and each precinct.
The same is true for a football victory. Or home mortgages. Or religion. News design is an invitation. I tell my students to frame a package as if they’re saying, “This, dear reader, is why this is worth your time. Won’t you come in?”
Ahhh, print.
And into our lives comes Web design, with its templates and rules that are enforced by technological limitations, not by the stylebook conventions that reign in the print world.
A screen grab and a front page from the Missourian’s coverage of the Aug. 5, 2008, primary elections. Print coverage was easy to navigate and digest but contained only results. Online coverage carried full stories but was presented only as a list of stories. A Flash graphic merging the two, with rollover mugs leading to stories, would be ideal. When will that be possible in the deadline world?
Print design is about selling — or accurately and engagingly representing — an individual story, or today’s news overall. Web design is not about capturing the essence of a story. It’s about understanding where readers are going to go for specific information and ensuring they’ll find what they’re looking for. It’s about adding context and meaning through links and packaging. More depth. More context. Related stories. Original sources. If they can’t find it, it might as well not be there. In the online world, form can’t be allowed to take precedence over function.
Traditional design concepts hardly apply to a daily Web news product. Decisions about typography and color and grid are decided when a site is redesigned, not when today’s news is “designed.” If the digital furniture is good, the rest almost takes care of itself.
For normal news days, that works pretty well. For now. But do I long for the day when I can have as much control over the way the news is presented online as I do in print? You bet. Or maybe the fate of online design is that aesthetics and visual creativity will matter less and less, and searchability will reign.
While I wait for the dust to settle, I revel in the special package. The interactive project that takes advantage of the capabilities of the Web. The voters guide that gets its own site so stories can relate to each other in ways that are easy to follow, rather than a list of links.
At the Columbia Missourian, we have designers creating sites outside our content management system when a story calls for it. Many newsrooms aren’t set up to accommodate that, and it’s admittedly a workaround. But it teaches our students to design — in the print sense of the word — a digital experience. And it shows readers how we treat packages we think are really special, really worth their time. Can news Web sites adapt to allow for the special without sacrificing the ease of the daily?
At its core, design is preparing the news for consumption. Highlighting what’s most important. Giving context to the information, helping it resonate. Telling stories. Engaging readers. At its core, it’s all about the journalism.
Everything else has always been subordinate anyway, right?
Joy Mayer is an assistant professor at the Missouri School of Journalism and the design editor at the Columbia Missourian. She loves print design, gets a geeky charge out of Web design and is laboring to merge the two.