July 13, 2009
This is an assignment done recently for class (ENGL 408C: The Rhetoric of Digital Design). The goal was to "Discuss the design of an online newspaper ... Combine the terminology of newspaper design with the observations of social semiotics." I chose theglobeandmail.com mostly because they recently did a redesign — it got mixed reviews (exhibit A, exhibit B, exhibit C, Google the rest yourself!) and from an aesthetic standpoint, I'm not the biggest fan either — which gave me quite a bit to talk about.
March 4, 2009
This article was originally written in August 2008 as a submission for the Digital Design Research Project, with the hopes of exploring the various technologies in use by the magazine industry and what movements the trends were indicating. Note, as this was written in 2008, some of the points mentioned are either outdated or no longer valid.
My independent digital design project (DAC 400) completed as part of my Digital Arts Communication specialization explored the push by magazines into the online and technology spaces. The goal of the project was to explore viable technologies to use as a platform for developing an online presence for The Boar, an arts and literary magazine produced by and for the students in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Waterloo. I explored the traditional online website format but looked further by designing a prototype of an up-and-coming Flash-based technology known as the "digital edition." This "new technology" is being adopted industry-wide like wildfire (see Issuu, Scribd, Zinio, etc.). It takes a traditional PDF and converts it into an interactive magazine-like object on a webpage that can be used and manipulated much like a physical magazine. My prototype (although not entirely functional) took a step further and explored the possibilities of creating greater ties between a magazine's website and their digital edition via a synchronization of comments, bookmarking, and other social networking type tools.
