Answering the Call

About a year ago,  Jason Santa Maria saw a trend for major publications that were creating beautiful layouts in their print editions and then just dumping their content online. In the past, this may have been relatively acceptable but with the emergence of standards and good support of CSS across the majority of browsers designers are now capable of transforming their web content into beautiful layouts. With the growing popularity of blogs and CMS systems this seems even further from a possibility, right? Besides what publication has the time and budget to create a new layout for each article, especially when articles may be time sensitive?

The Winds of Change

Jason managed to manipulate his CMS tool of choice, Expression Engine, with the help of some friends to create a flexible grid and be able to design each article he wrote. Every time he has a new post, I am compelled to jump out of my lowly RSS reader and not only read but see his article. Each one is always impressive, inspiring and well worth the trip outside the confines of Google Reader. Each unique design helps tell the story while adding new meaning to the article.

“We’ve made so many advancements in how we publish content that we haven’t looked back to what it is we’re actually creating. Many of us see the clear separation between things like print design and web design, but I’ve really been questioning the reality of why things are this way.”Jason Santa Maria

Of course there are some down sides to this. I have already mentioned the time it would take and the budget that would be needed to design each article. There is also  the extra download time of CSS files and font files associated with each design. with download speeds not slowing down any time soon this is more of a moral problem. I would imagine most publication companies would have to redevelop their CMS so that it has the flexibility to allow for the designs, which would not be cheep or easy.

The anti-decline?

We are seeing publication readership head toward the web more and more and the physical publication subscriptions decrease. The need to differentiate between blogs both professional and amateur, news sites, and publications will increase. Most current newspaper sites and magazine sites have the same basic grid based layout, each blending into the next.

I believe the budget for design will slowly transition over to web design and creating richer experiences online instead of a dumping ground for content. For main article designs will help captivate audiences keeping short attention spans and gaining recognition. This would be an ample opportunity to get better ad revenue and all the other good stuff that comes with retaining an audience.

There should be a limit to the articles that get a unique design, but the magazine or newspapers feature should benefit from a fresh coat of paint. Time sensitive articles can be put into a framework that is already in place and secondary articles might not need a unique design. To the New York Times’ credit they have started to do this with some of their articles, I would just like to see them get a little more adventurous.

As it applies to me

Much like Jason, I have designed and built this site so that I could basically change everything for a single post. Yes, I mean everything. I realized that I was redesigning my web site every few months because I was learning more and getting bored with the way my site looked. I wanted a place to experiment with new web technology and break the rules of the web (see “My First Art Set”) and quell the thirst for total redesign.

Unlike Jason, I am implementing a six column grid, compared to his five, and customized the 960gs framework to suit my needs. The HTML is ‘class-ified’ so I can easily add CSS hooks without any added markup. Of course I don’t hold the same company that Jason does to help me out with a custom EE blog. Luckily I can use the WordPress art director plug in, released sometime after Jason’s first post. It enables me to add in custom CSS for each page into the header and any jQuery or Cufón fonts I wish to load in. All of the color on my site is set in RGBa so it can easily take the tone of the color or image behind it (this trick I stole from Wilson Miner who has an incredibly beautiful site).

With all that rambling comes some disclaimers. I have still not decided what I’m going to do with IE support. With all of my experimentation there are going to obviously be bugs and issues and problems and headaches with IE. Other than that I hope most browsers will be able to render this acceptably. Let me know if there are any problems/bugs and I will do my best to fix them.

Lastly, if you want some more on the subject have a listen to the “Not the same old story” panel at SXSWi 2009 and you can watch Jason’s “SVA DOT DOT DOT” lecture.

Update: Apparently I cant count, Jason’s blog uses an 8 column grid and the customization comes from a CSS system. My apologies Jason.