24/04/07

More Links, mainly design, April 2007

Sorry, this is a really fragmented post. More of a collection of links, combined with some notes.

A really, *really* great site for any Penguin-philes. (Via City of Sound, and others.) And Pelicans. I’m still waiting for a wild sighting of JK Galbraith’s American Captialism. And they also have A Fletcher week section to the site. Mmmmm. Oh, and while we’re there.

And then I got sucked into this.

Doing a bit of thinking about magazine / newspaper site design at the moment. And thought it worth bringing up Subtraction which refers to the New Times Design [example page here], the grid, and lots of other stuff.

Which magazines work? Difficult. Of the literary magzines, not many. We have the New Yorker. Lots of white space, carefully crafted NY headings, but a really confusing interactive design about what is (and isn’t) a link, and tiny typesizes. Lots of different grids without much logic that I could find for why.

Looking at those with subscription models, I can’t find anything to like in Harper’s, and it resembles those programming textbooks that fill me with dread. It’s almost flattened by the weight of its own archive, but the archive is only available as PDF to subscribers. Still, when you get to content - and the confusing timeline header aside - it’s OK, if a little dry.

Almost everyone seems to have adopted wider than 800 pixels.

I like these pages on the New York Times. But pagination makes me feel uneasy. I don’t think the Guardian ever does it - do they?

And the LRB? It does feel like doing your homework. Lots and lots of text. Even some book jackets would be nice. I like the subject tags a lot, but don’t feel they’re totally integrated into the content. It’s also a shame the listing starts off with three articles outside of the subhect range. And it would be nice to see the weighting of keywords in the archive. The listings themselves aren’t particularly informative either - and share the problem of some items being described and others not. Why? Oh, I just found this:

The LRB web site currently contains an index of all articles going back to the beginning of 1998. This index consists of contributors’ names, article titles, reviewed items and issue details as well as details of how to order back issues and reprints. Apart from a few sample articles (typically two or three per issue) the full text of articles from before 2001 is not currently available online. Subscribers have access to the full text of material from 2001 onwards (with the exception of a few articles which are not available at their authors’ request for copyright or other reasons). For tips on searching and more information about what is available online click here.

I’m really going off Georgia bold.

Paris Review has a pretty confusing hierarchy and like the other sites, it’s really hard to work out what is in the archive (and available or not to a non-subscriber). But I like the way they upload images from the archive.

I don’t like the Spectator site at all, although I expect its audience does. (The headings look a lot like the Telegraph paper headings).

Economist?. Nice strong header. Kind of falls off a bit under that. But some great article pages.

Aha! Web Typography Sucks! (From SXSW) Slides and audio. And, uh, uhoh. That’s worth a whole new post.

And, finally (Josh!), I just found this going through my emails looking for the above link: DJ Shadow breaks played by a school orchestra.

Posted by Peter Collingridge in Design, Music, Web.

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