Archive for September, 2005

Reading about the Guardian newspaper’s redesign brought to mind the Newseum, the Interactive Museum of News, which I visited in Arlington, VA before it closed in 2002 for relocation to Washington DC. It is scheduled to reopen in 2007, so sponsors events with other organizations during this interim period.

I’m happy to say that the Newseum has a web presence which includes a guided tour of the new museum, special features and a visual comparison of front pages from newspapers all around the world (though heavily US oriented). It’s called Today’s Front Pages and is a fine resource for comparing both front page headines and layouts.

When I first saw the the redesigned Guardian front page I was surprised to see the masthead dropped down below a row of photos and captions, and the masthead reversed out of a colored background. After taking a look at front pages in Today’s Front Pages, I see that other newspapers, such as the Chicago Tribune, have instituted those ideas already, though perhaps not as successfully.

The new front page is very clean and modern, at least the first edition. We’ll see how well the design holds up in use over time. One of the little controversies of the new design is the masthead using a lower case letters, with the words run together: theguardian. The concern is whether the paper’s authority is lessened. In my opinion, the effect is modern, friendly and open, which works well with the Guardian’s left of center stance.

Imagine you’re moving down a crowded city street. You are surrounded by people thinking their own thoughts. What would the topics they are considering look like if you could plot them somehow? Let’s not go there, you might not want to know…

Well then, how about imagining a bunch of blogs, magazines, newspapers on the Web. If you could plot the topics they are discussing, what would that look like?

A TagCloud, that’s what. TagClouds do just that – they extract keywords from the content you specify and list them according to their prevalence.

Let’s take a look at two TagClouds that I created for my web site:
Langfeldesigns TagClouds

The first one shows current keywords in a selection of Design blogs. The second one shows current keywords in a selection of news web sites. The larger and brighter the word, the larger the number of references were found by the application.

TagClouds may seem a little frivolous, but they could help you put your finger on the pulse of your audience, if you could identify blogs created by or for your audiences. As time goes on, they will give us the ability to show what’s hot!