Since the acquisition by Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, The Washington Post has gone through an amazing transformation during the past three years. Two people critical to that transformation and growth are Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, Managing Editor, and Joey Marburger, Director of Product. Join them for a fireside chat to learn about what the past few years have been like at The Post and what the future holds.
The Digital Media Design team at NPR strives to design experiences that meet listeners and readers across the all places they are now and will be in the future—websites, smartphones, tablets, connected cars, connected homes, wearables, and more.
Over the past several years, the team has launched and iterated on NPR One—NPR’s personalized, on-demand listening service—on over a dozen platforms. At the same time, we’ve redesigned large swaths of NPR.org, entirely rebuilt the web audio player, created essential internal editorial tools, and embarked on a ground-up rebuilt of the flagship NPR mobile app. Through all these projects, maintaining a consistent, shared vision of how we reach audiences and serve journalism has been essential.
In this presentation, I'll discuss three keys to successful platform and product design at NPR—audience-centric research & design processes, service to journalists, and partnership with local stations. I'll explore how these key themes impact our work and share the lessons we’ve learned in designing products that scale while meeting the needs of each of these core constituencies.
Dave Crossland, Roger Black, and David Jonathan Ross (DJR) have just one word for you: Variations.
Or, as it's more formally known, the OpenType 1.8 Font Variations format. It’s the first big change in digital fonts in twenty years, and has big potential for news designers.
Variations fonts can combine multiple styles into a single font file. For example:
Compressed and Wide—and everything in between. Designers can select weights anywhere between light and bold, shaking off the fixed incremental constraints inherent in traditional fonts. If you need your type to be a little bolder for smaller sizes, you can simply adjust it in the style sheet without adding another font to the library. This can save space on a network, reduce load times, and provide more flexibility.
Roger will explain what this whole variations thing is all about and explore how the typographical lessons of the past few centuries have led to this new format. “Coordinating styles and sizes of fonts in a publication is much of our work,” Roger says, “and now we’re working on many platforms for the same news brand.” The OpenType Font Variations format is a solution that will make it all work together.
Dave, who has been fascinated with the power of type interpolations since he began studying typography in the early 00s, has commissioned two groundbreaking Variations Fonts for Google Fonts from David Berlow and the Type Network team.* These powerful fonts exploit more “axes” than just weight and width. Decovar changes the tips of the stems and adjusts the height of the crossbars within letters. Amstelvar has primary axes that enable 'programmatic' typography. With Variations, responsive web design now includes responsive typography.
DJR gets real. He will demo a variety of pages and explain how they can take advantage of the tech. There will be multi-size news pages, text that responds to different conditions, and, for branding, logos that can be varied according to use. And if this all sounds too serious, he’ll show what Variations can do for his amazing display font, Fit.**
The future of typography is every day!
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* Variations fonts by David Berlow and the Type Network team:
Amstelvar https://fontbureau.typenetwork.com/brochure/opentype-variable-fonts-moving-right-along
Decovar https://www.typenetwork.com/brochure/decovar-a-decorative-variable-font-by-david-berlow
**DJR’s Fit, which has a Variations version in Beta.
Fit https://djr.com/fit/
With the advent of voice-activated products and platforms, more news companies are dipping their toes in voice and conversational bots. For designers, this raises the question—how do you approach design when it’s invisible? In her session, Sanette Tanaka will go over how her team designed an Amazon Echo bot, never having worked with voice interfaces prior. She will walk you through the steps she followed to adapt her design process for voice, and introduce some methods that you can incorporate in your own newsroom.
It’s with great pleasure that we introduce two of the SND Lifetime Achievement Award winners for 2017: Darcy Greene and Cheryl Pell.
Darcy Greene and Cheryl Pell have taught together for nearly 30 years at Michigan State University in the College of Communication Arts and Sciences. Bringing students to nearly every SND workshop since 1994 and spearheading the strong student chapter, Greene and Pell are often referred to as the Society’s dynamic duo. The pair even wrote a joint statement when notified of their awards!
YURI VICTOR: Web design is dead. The future of design is undergoing an evolution as audiences move away from websites to environments where designers have little control or capabilities such as Snapchat, Apple News, Facebook Instant Articles, or Accelerated Pages. This talk will discuss the death of websites and apps, embracing change, and what's next for designers.
For any company, the path to success is always charted by its people. But how do you build products and teams that win? How do you establish processes that meet key business objectives, but still give your team room to run and grow? What does good leadership look like these days?
In this keynote, we’ll hear from three digital leaders who have answered questions like these and proven success at building teams for organizations like ESPN, theSkimm, Texas Tribune, The Washington Post, and Whereby.Us. This session is intended to be conversational, so be armed with questions for our three presenters.
Tobias Frere-Jones will look at the mechanics of reading, and how he repurposed a centuries-old solution to improve on-screen legibility.
Whether it’s a few words in an interface or a thousand words in a blog post, we read words on screens over and over each day. But even with advances in resolution, screens can still hinder us in recognizing and interpreting letters. Frere-Jones has spent decades studying type history and working with today’s rasterizing technology. He found a strategy — commonplace for hundreds of years — that could be applied to this new challenge, and help our eyes and brains in a pixel environment.
He will present a case study of a recent type design project applying these renewed strategies to improve legibility.
Three, two, one … blast off!
Okay, you already know how to design so now’s time to fire up your engine with more impact by adding motion to your design game. With the explosive growth of motion graphics this is a great opportunity to participate in our hands-on motion graphics session and skyrocket to next level of storytelling.
Pre-registration required
How can you tell your biggest story from every possible angle? How can you be ready for the unexpected? And, what if your biggest story never ends… but just keeps going and going and evolving?
For The Post and so many organizations, our biggest story the last 18 months has been the Election, then the Transition, and now on to the 45th Presidency. We’ll walk you through a range of work from our more than 100 projects, 400+ pages and countless other pieces we built across platforms. We’ll highlight what led to some of our best Election coverage in the newspaper's history, while not shying away from the things we wish we had done differently. Most importantly, we’ll make sure you walk away with a blueprint on how your newsroom might be better prepared for your next big story.
It’s with great pleasure that we introduce the third SND Lifetime Achievement Award winners for 2017: Randy Stano.
Stano has taught at the University of Miami School of Communications since 1995. He served as president of SND in 1992, the same year that Hurricane Andrew devastated communities south of Miami. The Miami Herald won a Pulitzer Prize for that coverage, design-directed by Stano in 1993, along with a Best of Show and six gold medals from SND. Earlier, Stano served as assistant art director at The Kansas City Times when they won a Pulitzer for coverage of the Hyatt Hotel disaster in 1982.
The next World Cup is just around the corner. Yep, you heard it right, that's next year. But when do you start brainstorming your content or create a plan of action? Our answer: Now. In this session, get some insights and inspirations from two speakers from Times of Oman who were responsible for orchestrating an award-winning World Cup supplement. It was a showcase of creativity, graphic and visual experiments that earned Times of Oman two Judges' Special Recognitions in SND 36 for its "indefatigable creativity" and its "creative range and spirit." Just consider how they managed to pull off one edition without any text -- just pure visuals. Or how they produced a life-size 3D ball graphic that won two gold and named the "Best of Show" in Malofiej Awards.
Lauren Leto and Sam Williams both build conversational products, but they come at it from completely different ways.
Leto is an author, entrepreneur and product nerd best known for co-founding the viral website, “Texts From Last Night.” Her latest product, “Listen,” could fundamentally change how we use mobile devices by treating phone numbers as usernames and prioritizing conversation like a social feed. Williams is a software engineer for the Quartz bot studio, where he helped build the organization’s first news app and tinkers with experimental projects.
In this session, Leto and Williams will share tips, tricks, and lessons learned from their efforts to build conversational products inside and outside the newsroom.
Centralized printing operations were the first wave of productivity enhancements for news operations. That led to better equipment (one good press can be better than a handful of older presses), improved quality control (easier to monitor and adjust one than a dozen), and usually results in better delivery from plants located near major roads. But what about design and layout… and copy editing? In this wide-ranging discussion, you’ll discover there’s no one-size-fits-all… and that these hubs often create other important content creation capabilities. Interested in exploring a design hub for your organization, or what it takes to work in a design hub? Leaders from the leading design hubs/centers will share their insights in the double-session sponsored by the Reynolds Journalism Institute - Missouri School of Journalism. We'll examine the current state of the state of life in the nation's leading shared design centers, and include information from clients of these hubs, and lessons learned.
RJI is proud to continue a tradition of sponsoring content and speakers at the SND Workshop for several years. Some past notables include: Trina Chiasson, Dan Archer, Paul Bolls, Alex Remington
Highlights will include:
