Blueprint is a CSS framework based very heavily on the work Nathan, Christian and I did at the Journal-World (and also taking some cues from Wilson Miner and Khoi Vinh). I’m happy to see it out there and someone else supporting it (since we never could have), but I do sort of wish I’d at least gotten a heads up that someone was planning to package and release it. I suppose Olav didn’t need to ask for permission, but it would have been the polite thing to do. We never really intended our work to see the light of day, but I’m not really bothered that is has. And, Olav does give credit where credit is due.
Anyway, it does look good. It’s got a few minor improvements on what we had built and is packaged very neatly. Give it a look, if you’re interested in this sort of thing. Visit site »
Christian’s awesome Typogrify module for Django has been ported to drupal. I think it’s available now on just about every popular personal publishing platform there is. Awesome. Visit site »
My old cronies at the Journal-World launched yet another Django/Ellington-powered newspaper site today. Christian Metts is primarily responsible for the design work on this one (no doubt with some help from Nathan Borror and Richard Cornish). Visit site »
I’m so excited to see Christian’s Typogrify being ported to all these popular publishing platform. The web is getting prettier every day! Visit site »
A port of Christian’s typogrify for Rails. Since my post about typogrify here, I think it’s been ported to just about every web development language under the sun. Awesome. Visit site »
Hamish Macpherson has ported Christian’s awesome set of Django filters over to PHP for use as a WordPress plug-in. Nice. Visit site »
Ever since I’ve worked at the Journal-World, I’ve lamented the fact that the typography on our sites left something to be designed. Straight quotes, widows all over the ...
Yet another data-oriented interactive journalism project from our crew. Credit for this one goes to Matt Croydon on the data modeling, importing, and JavaScript, Christian Metts on the visual design, and Christine Metz on the reporting (yes, I said Christian Metts and Christine Metz). Good stuff. Visit site »
Another beautiful piece of interactive journalism and multimedia storytelling from The Journal-World. This one was designed by Nathan Borror with assistance from Christian Metts and direction from David Ryan.
This is an early attempt at something we’ve been talking about for a while, but are just starting to really do. That is, to take a story and tell it the way it wants to be told. Wether that’s video, audio, text, photos, infographics, or anything else — the important thing is the story. This is in contrast to most newspaper companies, who still hold text-based pieces as the cornerstone.
Take a look around. You’ll find that many sites are doing videos and photos and such — but rarely are they first-class citizens. Usually it’s a basic text-based story layout with a few additional bits of multimedia in a sidebar somewhere. We don’t want to do that (at least not exclusively). If the best way to tell a story is through a video with some supporting text, then we want to use video with some supporting text. We don’t want the fact that we’re (historically) a newspaper company to keep us from telling stories the way they’re best told.
Besides the “mediums besides text can be first-class” approach, this is also an example of taking a big, multi-part (even multi-day, in print) piece and giving it an art-directed design all it’s own online. You’re going to see a lot more of this from us in the future.
And besides that, it’s yet another sneak preview of the design direction for the new LJWorld.com, which should launch this month. Check out the tight 16-column grid! Visit site »