Designing The News » Thoughts

Outdoor pictogram headlines

Dave — Fri, 09 May 2008 10:34:33 +0000

Just thinking that it might be nice to see these pictogram headlines concepts I did adopted into a functioning platform for use in public spaces, and perhaps even incorporated into a news website.

The idea would be that a simple application would pull headlines from the BBC News website, or any website, and seperate the headline into individual words. It would then check a database to see if there is a pictogram associated with that word and display it. This would loop for all words until the headline is complete. If there is no pictogram for the word available, then it will just display the word and update an online list that symbols for word ‘X’ are needed.

Here’s a couple of examples mocked up with stock photos to see what I’m talking about.

Pictogram Headlines
A quick concept idea for using headlines displayed as a series of pictograms. This proposal could be installed in a number of public spaces, train stations, bus depots, airports, etc. on large screen visual displays. The headlines in pictograms would cross multiple language barriers, and carry the English alternative underneath. When people are used to seeing them then they will eventually be able to quickly see the news just by using the pictures.

Anyone have any thoughts? I know I’d find it more interesting when at a train/bus station to have rotating headlines.

The art of being concise, or not

Dave — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 05:26:14 +0000

I just thought I’d post this little update as I’m currently about half way through a 6000 word minimum illustrated report on the work I’m doing for university.

I think I’m a pretty concise person. When I write anything I usually try to get to the point pretty quickly, and don’t like to spin anything out too long unless it’s funny or there’s a payoff at the end. I have to say, there’s only so much ‘padding’ you can add to a description of what I’m doing and why. Most of the descriptions I write about my work are those that I’ve taken the time to explain in 100 words or less, thereby being concise and to the point.

I’m not going to say ‘bullshitting’, but ‘padding’ a report, is hard work. Nobody wants to read anything unnecesary in a report document, but 6000 words minimum is 6000 words minimum.

One week of The Guardian: Monday

Dave — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 19:02:31 +0000

UPDATE: This post has been updated on 05 April 2008. The original contents of this post can be found in this text file.

Well here’s version 2 of Monday’s edition. I like to think of this as 1.0, and the previous was just the beta. Software gets beta’d all the time, why can’t posters?

Anyways, I felt I ‘copped out’ a bit on the first effort. I think it had a strong message, but I don’t think it was being communicated in the best way possible. A bit of typography and a wee jiggery pokery and here we are.

And there’s a story behind the nutritional information bit. I was watching a programme on the BBC about Britain’s addiction to microwave meals, and how people would stand in the supermarkets and read the whole packets of the meals before deciding if they wanted to put that in their mouths or not. Well why not with information? I think with information as with food, some ingredients are better than others.

The Series

This is one day in a series that takes the news from one week of the Guardian newspaper, and visually represents it as a series of static visualisations. You may also be interested in:

Monday - A typographic and layout based piece previewing the contents of the paper as ingredients.
Tuesday - A list of headlines contained in the paper illustrated with references to the article or subject.
Wednesday - A polar graph inspired layout mapping the stories and categories on colour coded concentric circles.
Thursday - A content map showing the relationships between information inside of a circular container.
Friday - A text heavy piece highlighting the sheer amount of information contained within in the paper.
Saturday - A grid based typographic piece, showing patterns and author relationships through the paper.

Newspapers, books, and rather large word counts

Dave — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 12:06:30 +0000

After collecting all the data for One Week Of The Guardian, I’ve been looking through the statistics. One thing that struck me was the amount of words in the news for all 6 days, Monday to Saturday. In one week, there were 182,001 words. That sounds alot to me, but I managed to read all the papers and extract all the data in about 6 days (averaging 7-8 hours a day of actually working), but how does 182,000 compare to the average book?

From what I’ve found out, the average book length is about 80,000 words, at 250 words to a page, that’s about 320 pages, or about 2.3x less than the amount of words in a weeks worth of the Guardian newspaper.

So for every week that passes, you can either read the newspaper everyday, or replace the newspaper for a book. Two books infact, lots of short stories, or one huge big novel. You’ll have to decide what’s more important; updated news, or some classic stories.

How long will it take me to read the average book?

I guess that just depends on how fast you read. Luckily, the internet being the internet, you can take a 60 second test to find out just that. Then take your average reading speed, divide it by the average number of words in a book (or if you have a specific book you want to find out, multiply the number of pages by 250 to find the average wordcount) then divide it by 60 to convert the total into hours, and that’s how long it takes for you to read a book (minus distractions, making a brew, looking up words you don’t understand, slaying vampires, etc., etc.).

Incase anyone’s interested, I seem to read at about 350 words per minute. (Although I’ve been reading Band Of Brothers for about 3 years… I’m savouring it!)

20 images to focus thoughts for the project

Dave — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 22:17:43 +0000

This was an assigned task to find twenty images that represent the roots and scope of the project I will spend my final year working on. In order to design the news effectively, I will be looking at a number of different angles; Data representation, visualisations, user interactivity, typography, mapping, graphic storytelling, seperation and grouping of common elements, and disecting the news in its current forms.

Most of the images relate to specific experiments that I intend to create during the course of the final year.

Interactive news systems

Will be looking at news multiscreens and interactive news setups to see if I can disect, replicate, and improve the interface.

Creating the news

In an episode of Brass Eye, Chris Morris starts a war by manipulating the news. This was also done in the film of the James Bond series, Tomorrow Never Dies. A media mogul commits horrible crimes only to report on them before any of the other newspapers can.

Interacting with the news on a daily basis

Ze Frank held a year long experiment where he reported on news events with his own personal input. This was then backed up with the opinions of the viewers via a forum Ze would monitor. This cycle of interaction with the news, coupled with Ze’s unique brand of comedy made the show a must watch.

Graphically representing the news

Taking news headlines and representing them graphically as poster art.

Graphically representing the news continued

Taking news headlines and representing them graphically as poster art.

Headline reduction

Taking news headlines and reducing them as far as possible but still communicating the message.

Reducing ‘news spam’

Alot of what is published as news is really not. Who cares if Paris Hilton goes to jail? Is this really the quality of news we expect to see on the BBC?

Splitting up a news report into single frames

Splitting up a news report into frames which depict the emotion of the news reporter, and captioned with the story they are conveying at particular moments in time.

News report interface disection

Every news programme now has some sort of interface to showcase current story highlights, upcoming stories, sometimes the time and the date, as well as other ‘informative’ bits. I’m going to see if I can create a more informative interface for broadcast news using Flash.

Good news bad news

An article published on the Guardian website got me thinking about the seperation of good news and bad news.

10x10 visual news mapping

Using the 10x10 news aggregation service to visualise ways of representing the news.

Buzztracker news location mapping

Tracking the latest news stories by location, the Buzztracker visualises hot points over a world map.

NewsIsFree newsmaps

A highly advanced and customisable newsmap from NewsIsFree, it allows you to change a wide array of options to map the news specific to you.

Marumushi newsmaps

A beautiful looking newsmap from Marumushi. Very customisable, beautifully animated, and colour categorised.

newscubes

Newsmapping in a 3d environment, using a cube to hold the news data with a different category on each face.

Dynamic news timeline

An interactive timeline which pulls the latest news from a list of different sources and displays them as a categorised timeline.

News aggregator

Aggregation of news sources to be displayed in a user designated format to offer news personalised for the individual. Popurls aggregates feeds, but does not offer a page personalised for the individual.

Visualising News - DiggArc

The DiggArc is a way of visualising the stories submitted to the social news networking site, digg.com. The arc colour categorises the popular stories, and links them based on the users who have ‘dugg’ them.

Visualising News - DiggBigSpy

The DiggSpy is another way of visualising the stories submitted to digg.com. This one stacks the latest stories on top of one another, and increases the textsize based on the popularity.

Animated Typography

I’m a big fan of animated typography, and I was thinking I’d like to record a story from something like BBC News 24 and animate it typographically. That might be nice? Here’s another good typography animation.