3 ms·

Bit of a sidenote but I'm an NYT subscriber partly because I really enjoy their web design. It may be a controversial opinion on HN (where all websites lead to

by naet 4y ago

Bit of a sidenote but I'm an NYT subscriber partly because I really enjoy their web design. It may be a controversial opinion on HN (where all websites lead to discussions of "no JS"/ HTML only / no custom fonts, etc) but some of the NYT articles to me have very nice atmospheric effects weaved into them. They don't always land or work perfectly, some are overly heavy and don't perform well, but I always enjoy the effort and attempts at pushing some boundaries and making a more interactive or immersive experiences. I get the printed paper which I can always fall back on when I prefer a no-nonsense reading experience, but I like how they use available web technology to progressively enhance certain pieces. This article has a couple full screen parallax style videos that fade in and out as you scroll to enter and exit the story. They aren't strictly necessary for reading the story, so some might consider them extra fluff, but to my eyes the effect helps set the scene of a wide open and lonely ocean right off the bat which adds to the emotions I feel get reading it. The performance seems better on the official site than the archive.org link btw.

qwertyuiop_ 4y ago
paulcole 4y ago
Whether on a peanut butter sandwich or in an NYT article, isn’t it the extra fluff that makes life worth living? I just can’t understand the attitude of so many people here on HN who seem to wish everything was so plain.
- naet 4y ago
  I definitely like some things with more plain and simple styling when it's a good choice. For example I far prefer HN to Reddit style wise. I love checking baseball scores on plaintextsports over ESPN (partly because baseball serializes so well into text). But I also think there are plenty of positive styling opportunities for modern websites that can be great when used tastefully, like this NYT article. Nothing here was taking away from the reading experience, only adding to it IMO.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
vlz 4y ago
I am currently working on a project actually where the client came to us with a similar NYT article and said „I want something like this“. The umbrella term for these is „scrollytelling“, I think, and the NYT does it very tastefully. Another fine effect they have is highlighting details in an image when you scroll, e.g. in this: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/03/11/nyregion/nyc-chinatown-signs.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/03/11/nyregion/nyc-...
_8j50 4y ago
The money isn't the problem. I basically use private mode for everything so I don't want to signin and even if that wasn't the case I don't want to register or give out a trackable and resellable payment info to an organization that tracks what I read and how long and what related content I engage with on their site.
dredmorbius 4y ago
I'm ... notafan. Case in point, there've been a few Octavia Butler pieces out recently. The one that hit HN was from Vulture, and is ... a pretty conventionally-formatted article: <https://www.vulture.com/article/octavia-e-butler-profile.html https://www.vulture.com/article/octavia-e-butler-profile.htm...> (HN discussion: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33747547 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33747547>) I'd also run across an article at the NYT and ... it's utterly unreadable. <https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/11/17/arts/octavia-butler-vision-kindred.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/11/17/arts/octavia-...> I hadn't actually tried reading it on a desktop until just now, but yeah, it fails there too. And yes, I have things locked down, but I can't even be bothered to try to sort out what I'd need to tweak to get it to work. It's not just the JS and jazz, but on my principle reading device, an e-ink tablet, the visuals literally get in the way of the text. I've got 16 shades of grey to work with, really high resolution, and a piss-poor refresh rate. (NYT's obsession with animations is also rapidly getting very tiresome.) Fortunately, my preferred browser on e-ink, EInkBro, has a reader mode. So I invoked that and dropped all the UX gunk and ... frankly, the Vulture's story is simply better written and far more rewarding to read. "Set Adrift" actually has ... fairly reasonable writing. So it's not the hard fail the Butler piece was. But UI/UX does get in the way. There's any number of other points on which the Times simply falls down by innovating too hard. Their tables aren't tabular, their data visualisations don't visualise, or provide data. Their long-forms aren't readable. And using the tools for long-term archival --- Pocket, print-to-PDF, print-to-ePub (a feature of EInkBro), Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, etc. --- the Times's formatting again gets in the way of being able to capture a useful snapshot or rendering of the article. It's actually quite disappointing. And whilst HN's guidelines are to not discuss UI/UX, that's very clearly key to the Times's presentation here, so I'm declaring it on-topic so far as I'm concerned.

by naet 4y ago

qwertyuiop_ 4y ago

paulcole 4y ago

Whether on a peanut butter sandwich or in an NYT article, isn’t it the extra fluff that makes life worth living? I just can’t understand the attitude of so many people here on HN who seem to wish everything was so plain.

naet 4y ago
I definitely like some things with more plain and simple styling when it's a good choice. For example I far prefer HN to Reddit style wise. I love checking baseball scores on plaintextsports over ESPN (partly because baseball serializes so well into text). But I also think there are plenty of positive styling opportunities for modern websites that can be great when used tastefully, like this NYT article. Nothing here was taking away from the reading experience, only adding to it IMO.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

vlz 4y ago

I am currently working on a project actually where the client came to us with a similar NYT article and said „I want something like this“. The umbrella term for these is „scrollytelling“, I think, and the NYT does it very tastefully. Another fine effect they have is highlighting details in an image when you scroll, e.g. in this: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/03/11/nyregion/nyc-chinatown-signs.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/03/11/nyregion/nyc-...

_8j50 4y ago

The money isn't the problem. I basically use private mode for everything so I don't want to signin and even if that wasn't the case I don't want to register or give out a trackable and resellable payment info to an organization that tracks what I read and how long and what related content I engage with on their site.

dredmorbius 4y ago

I'm ... notafan. Case in point, there've been a few Octavia Butler pieces out recently. The one that hit HN was from Vulture, and is ... a pretty conventionally-formatted article: <https://www.vulture.com/article/octavia-e-butler-profile.html https://www.vulture.com/article/octavia-e-butler-profile.htm...> (HN discussion: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33747547 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33747547>) I'd also run across an article at the NYT and ... it's utterly unreadable. <https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/11/17/arts/octavia-butler-vision-kindred.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/11/17/arts/octavia-...> I hadn't actually tried reading it on a desktop until just now, but yeah, it fails there too. And yes, I have things locked down, but I can't even be bothered to try to sort out what I'd need to tweak to get it to work. It's not just the JS and jazz, but on my principle reading device, an e-ink tablet, the visuals literally get in the way of the text. I've got 16 shades of grey to work with, really high resolution, and a piss-poor refresh rate. (NYT's obsession with animations is also rapidly getting very tiresome.) Fortunately, my preferred browser on e-ink, EInkBro, has a reader mode. So I invoked that and dropped all the UX gunk and ... frankly, the Vulture's story is simply better written and far more rewarding to read. "Set Adrift" actually has ... fairly reasonable writing. So it's not the hard fail the Butler piece was. But UI/UX does get in the way. There's any number of other points on which the Times simply falls down by innovating too hard. Their tables aren't tabular, their data visualisations don't visualise, or provide data. Their long-forms aren't readable. And using the tools for long-term archival --- Pocket, print-to-PDF, print-to-ePub (a feature of EInkBro), Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, etc. --- the Times's formatting again gets in the way of being able to capture a useful snapshot or rendering of the article. It's actually quite disappointing. And whilst HN's guidelines are to not discuss UI/UX, that's very clearly key to the Times's presentation here, so I'm declaring it on-topic so far as I'm concerned.