Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

random designy notes

Ragged Right: The New York Times is making a subtle design differentiation between news and opinion content, reports the New York Observer:

As of Sept. 20 … The Times has instituted a sweeping but subtle redesign, to emphasize the difference between objective and subjective journalism. Straight news will remain, well, straight: laid out in justified columns, with even margins on the left and right. Stories that have been colored by analysis, commentary or authorial whimsy will all receive the layout previously reserved for columns: a straight left margin and a ragged right one.

“It sort of grew out the concern that we hear from some readers that feel that our coverage isn’t necessarily objective,” said Times design director Tom Bodkin. “Our sense is that they may get confused as to what stories are meant to have an individual voice, and which ones are straight news stories.” …

The change will extend even to stories that run on the front page … “If we put a column on the front page,” said Mr. Bodkin, “we want it to stand out as something different from the rest of the pieces on the page.”

So: News has even edges; opinion has an uneven edge. Except, that is, on the opinion pages. There, the columns will be justified like news, as always…

Mr. Bodkin said the change may not be that visible. “I think a lot of design is to address subconscious issues,” he said. “Even though people might not notice, they might recognize it subconsciously.”

News Reader: Over in Slate, Jack Shafer raves about the Times in another format: its still-in-beta Times Reader service. The Times Reader is a piece of software that displays the daily newspaper on your computer. I haven’t given it a try yet because it’s PC-only at this point. The Times Reader is interesting from a design perspective because the paper can exercise more stringent control over the user experience, bringing it a little closer to the experience of flipping through a newspaper in print. Even some of the fonts are the same, Shafer writes, as the new software supposedly “gives designers greater control over typography.”

(You mean there are more fonts out there than the standard Web fonts?)

Playing It Straight: Meanwhile, the print version of The Onion has undergone a redesign that makes it look more like a conventional newspaper. Columnist Michael Miner of The Chicago Reader writes:

I too thought the Onion had blundered, but my youngest daughter studied [art director Rick] Martin’s new design and announced that she got it. Think of the old Onion as a send-up of the Sun-Times, she instructed, and the new Onion as a send-up of the Tribune. “They’ve upped the ante,” she said. The red nose has been removed. “They’ve gone Colbert.” …

“The paper hadn’t gone through a redesign for over a decade,” Martin explained by phone from New York. “Within that span of time, newspapers have really changed. What I basically did was take a massive comprehensive survey of what periodicals are doing around me, from the New York Times to small weekly newspapers. And so I would say the Onion is a shambling zombie cobbled together from the most important parts of what papers are doing. The whole key here is verisimilitude. We’re serving the jokes by playing it straight…

“It’s such a hard line to walk — going the straight line and going for the laugh. I’ve always appreciated that the content was so absurd, and to contrast that content against the straight look and feel, I think it serves it — I hope it serves it.”

New and “Improved:” Hasbro has introduced a new, “modernized” Monopoly, complete with brand-name game pieces like a Starbucks mug and McDonald’s fries. (via The Skinny)