As technology evolves more and more quickly, we can only wonder if older media will soon go extinct. Some already believe “print is dead” while others feel that print just needs to evolve into something more. Social Driver’s Devon Hopkins had the opportunity to speak with J. Ford Huffman, a man of many talents – editor, designer, writer, and artist. Huffman offered some wonderful insight into the challenges print faces and how print has the ability to conquer them.
Photo by Lauren Tina Photography
Huffman recalls his commute on the metro to the Social Driver office where he noticed a fair amount of people around him reading a daily express paper. This paper still holds value because it is free, convenient, and easy to read. If you consider a college campus, daily college newspapers are very popular with students for the same reasons.
Huffman states, “if you had good content and you're in the right place at the right time and the right market, people will look at you and read you.” He puts a lot of emphasis on content.
Huffman still receives print magazines in the mail and enjoys them. You can read the news on your iPad, but you can't quite snuggle up with your iPad like you can a good magazine. And you can't replace your iPad, in the same ways you can replace a lost newspaper.
Maybe others are thinking this way too. Personally, I do not own an iPad and, I too, enjoy reading magazines while snuggled up on the couch. Huffman claims, ”I think print has been asleep for a while … and that people are beginning to understand that you can have both and maybe you even need both.”
Huffman explains this as the real problem, as opposed to whether or not “print is dead.” If anything, Huffman argues that the “print is dead” comments should send strong warnings to content suppliers and newspapers that they are not providing the quality content that their market wants.
Huffman says, “if the reader spots a hole, a missing part of a story, that makes the whole ne
wsroom look like it doesn't know it's content.. It needs the same content everywhere.” Readers should not spot a hole in any content at any time. Each news source must have someone with institutional knowledge to review the context before a crucial opportunity is missed.
He adds, “If you print an awesome graphic in the newspaper.. do not miss your opportunity to add a reference to where readers can find it on the Web. If you have an intriguing article in the middle of the newspaper that has the potential to be popular.. do not miss your opportunity to reference that on the front cover.”
Huffman says we need to be alert to tie-ins and put all the same content on every platform, leaning towards responsive design.
Huffman claims that if he were working in a newsroom he would be looking at digital agencies and talking with digital agencies to learn from them and share with them. Both newsrooms and digital agencies are huge content producers and should be offering ideas to one another regarding how they produce content. He says, “we need to get over that fear that it's all competitive and we can't share information… we need to build on each other.”
We need to make connections and share. Huffman says, “I think there is room for both print and digital. The smart thing is to figure out what works best on different medium.”
Huffman thinks we should take the opportunity to learn how to utilize every form and platform of media. Exposing yourself or your business to new things just might do the trick. Learning from a magazine that you have no interest in, talking to a new person at a cocktail party instead of the usual few people.
By looking around and sharing with others, we can develop new content and have a better understanding of how to utilize it. After that, importance lies on the fact that high quality work is produced with correct spelling, information, timeliness, superior images, and great content.
No matter who it is for, we have to work hard and be careful with the information we are giving out.
As far as leaders go in the space of integrating print and digital, Huffman says The Boston Globe has thus far got it covered. Social Driver agrees!
So what do you think? Is print media dead, dying, or drifting?
This is the third post in a series about Responsive Web Design, described in plain language from a front end designer.
Ok, so we’ve discussed why responsive web design is an excellent solution for our websites. Then we dug a little deeper into how it actually works. Today we want to share our 20 favorite responsively designed websites and why we think they’re so great.
The largest responsive website to date, The Boston Globe handles loads of content effortlessly, keeping the site intuitive and the content easily accessible on the device of your choice.
You should talk to us. Social Driver is now hiring both part-time and full-time front-end developers to help bring our responsive designs to life. We have free Nespresso and lots of fun!
I love this site. I really do. Smashing takes advantage of horizontal screen real estate like few responsive sites do. Go ahead expand your browser window out as far as your screen allows and it just maximizes the space without feeling cluttered. Furthermore, the strength of the layout and menu structure does not degrade at smaller screen sizes. Nicely done.
Clean layout, beautiful photography and playful iconography made me like this site immediately on my first visit. It’s a joy to look at and navigate on any device and if you’re a foody looking for scrumptious, healthy recipes it may be love at first site.
Type designer, Jan Tschichold once said, ‘Simplicity of form is never a poverty, it is a great virtue.’ The simple layout and understated menu and graphic elements juxtaposed against beautiful fluid images communicate that excellence in form and function are givens when working with this architecture studio. This site just says ‘good design’ whether I’m viewing it on my iPhone or my iMac.
If you haven’t check out Sphero, you should. It’s an amazing robotic ball gaming system for IOS and Android devices. But I’m not reviewing their product, just there site. A recent web design trend is the use of background photos that flood the browser window. Sphero does this well. The abstract product photos with a grid overlay don’t distract from the important content. I like the permanent menu and footer bars on my desktop, but appreciate how the footer moves to make room for more important content on my iPhone. Overall, the site is intuitive and attractive. An excellent example that responsive design done well looks great on any size screen.
It might be the conspicuous green frog that causes me love this site. Either way, it’s worth resizing your browser window just to see him change size, shape and color. But seriously, this is a polished responsive site. The breakpoints correspond well with the layout requirements and the result is a sharp looking site that does not degrade at any size. The main menu always looks good even when those sweet little icons go away to make room on smaller screens.
The Grey Goose site shows that designing responsively does not limit our designs to columns of fluid text and images on solid backgrounds. The sky is still the limit with what we can do responsively. Beautiful photography, parallax scrolling, intuitive navigation and refined typography combine to create a site that is as equally functional and attractive on my smart iPhone as it is my iMac. This list is not in order of our preference, but if it was I think Grey Goose would be at the top.
With a name like “New Adventures In Web Design,” one would expect a responsive site for this web design conference. I think my favorite aspect of this site is the use of fluid typography. Notice how the menu, headline and body text resize subtly to achieve optimal legibility on all devices. Good design is all about the details and this site has the details dialed in.
Websites in the higher education space are not necessarily known for being on the leading edge of design trends. So discovering the Lancaster site was a nice surprise. I appreciate its simple, modern, non-trendy look and feel. In spite of it’s large amount of content, it’s as easy to navigate on my iPhone as it is on my iMac.
The spacious layout, bold typography and simple icons make fundraise.com easy to look at and navigate.
Nick La’s blog is a wealth of information and resources for any designer or front end developer. But that’s not why it’s in our list. The great content is accompanied by subtle texture, beautiful illustration and–thanks to its responsive nature–is easily accessible no matter what device you fancy.
Heathlife celebrates the heritage of one of London’s largest parks. Though maybe not quite as stunning as the park itself, this website is a beauty on screens large and small.
Though this site is not fluid, it has well structured layouts for any device class. Where many large responsive websites omit content for smaller screen sizes, London & Partners keeps it all, maximizing accessibility for mobile users. This is a good reminder that responsive design is an excellent solution for large and small site alike.
Oliver Russell has done a good job of building a site that responds well on mobile devices while keeping the integrity of the design in tact. I appreciate the shallow and straight forward content structure. My eyes are drawn to the most important sales points and I can access nearly all that I want to know without leaving the homepage. Refreshingly simple compared to the laborious, text heavy website of other marketing firms. One complaint: I would like to see the site expand beyond width of 960 pixels on larger monitors.
Ryan is product designer at Facebook, but has invested in a personal portfolio site that is a cut above the norm. Well branded and brilliantly responsive, Ryan’s site is a thing of beauty on any screen.
Jessica’s lettering and illustration rocks and so does her site. Seriously, I can’t help but smile when I look at it. It is simple and elegant and delightfully fluid. Oh, and for good measure she through in three additional themes. One of which is “Teen Girl Mode”, replete with rediculously distracting animated gifs and a hideous cat illustration (Just click on the little heart in the upper right corner).
Maybe it’s the friendly King Trident mascot, but this happy little site makes me want to download the Fork cms straightaway, or at least “try the demo”. To increase mobile load times the CSS omits the fun header illustrations at smaller sizes. Overall, site reformats and displays nicely on a variety of display ports.
Ethan coined the phrase, ‘Responsive Web Design’ in 2010, so it comes without surprise that his website is responsive. Ethan’s belief in articulate and intelligent design is expressed in a site that is straight and to the point without extraneous decoration.
This t-shirt shop site stretches and shrinks to fill any size view port with photos of their hip graphic t’s. Fluid images and type make this site a joy to browse on any size device. One complaint: I think the menu could be smaller for use on smartphones. Currently it takes up an unnecessary amount of valuable screen space on my iPhone.
Trent’s site is an excellent example of fluid type. On a large monitor the text size is slightly bigger for increased readability, whereas the text shrinks to achieve comfortable line lengths and legibility on my iPhone. I also really like the simple block print style illustrations Trent includes in his articles.
