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I hate overly designed news articles. I want to read the words and maybe see a couple of relevant pictures, thanks. Similarly I suspect most of these different
by lmm 2y ago
I hate overly designed news articles. I want to read the words and maybe see a couple of relevant pictures, thanks.
Similarly I suspect most of these different individual maps are just bad. Whimsy and idiosyncrasy are all very well in theory, but in practice they're mostly just annoying.
- pfix 2y agoThe worth here is actually in hindsight as now historians can learn a lot about localities and local perceptions. They don't care as much about aesthetics (or at least perceive them in a different manner) But in general I assume you're right about the actual quality and it was hinted in the text. And when you take a look at the maps provided as examples, some of them are not accessible[1]. And for news articles, it really depends for me. Most of the time, I want the essence. But sometimes, especially with articles that are not actually news but a deeper analysis of a situation (e.g. ukraine war, palestine), I've read articles where on mobile it helped that they put extra effort in making the media work for the information by interleaving graphics, scrolling text, and so forth.[2] But as always this is also a matter of taste. [1] e.g.: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F223d349e-571c-45e7-92ff-fe9f6f3fa42b_2880x1800.png https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr... [2] I haven't bookmarked those texts and I am not sure if it is actual useful to pick one random example for this discussion so I just save my time searching for this one example I only vaguely remember.
- beAbU 2y agoYeah I feel the same. Interestingly, with the fact that the article is digital, surely we can leverage so many more different and interesting ways to present the information, but I feel like most prefer to just read the text. I think it's because everyone reads a paper article in a different way. If you ask people how they read a magazine, you'll get as many responses as respondents. Some read back to front (I do that for some reason), some read articles from top to bottom, some scan through and look at the pictures and captions, then pulled quotes, then the main text. Some even read the paragraphs out of order and assembles it all afterwards. Everyone consumes a body of text in a different way, and an article that jacks your scroll and does "fancy" stuff with the way you can access the content makes assumptions about how the reader prefers to consume the content, and this assumption is often very wrong for me personally.
- nicbou 2y agoThis is true on the web, but not in print. Salt Fat Acid Heat is a gorgeous book and the beauty just doesn't translate well to .epub
- card_zero 2y agoHey look, an idiosyncratic map by that illustrator. https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/64240ee4eb3a3b4b2059ff7c/64240ee4eb3a3ba0c959ffe0_image1.png https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/64240ee4eb3a3b4b2059ff7c/...
- yen223 2y agoWell, you've got your wish. Every damned website now looks the same. Whatever creativity the early internet promised has now been snuffed out to appease the user-metrics gods.
- arnorhs 2y agoI'm all for creativity but laying devil's advocate,.. who is this supposed creativity for? If the majority of people just want to scan headlines efficiently and read/parse.. isn't that a good thing for most people? Pragmatically speaking, the creativity is not needed for news articles/headlines. We need better reporting / journalism in online news, not more creative frills..
- mensetmanusman 2y agoThe left hemisphere wondering what creativity is for…
- crazygringo 2y agoI mean, for most of the twentieth centuries books all looked the same. Same handful of typefaces, sizes, margins, etc. Newspapers also. Same handful of column layouts, typefaces, styling. It's not about user metrics. It's that what's important is the content of the text itself, alongside whatever photographs and illustrations are necessary and informative. Websites are no different from the long tradition of books and newspapers in this regard. There are plenty of spaces for artistic, aesthetic creativity on the internet. No shortage whatsoever. More art than there's ever been before. There's no need in also trying to shoehorn it into nonfiction articles everywhere.