New Media Picks of the Week - The Kindle 2

I've been away from the new media maelstrom for a week and in that time, the Kindle 2 was introduced. This NY Times article about it lists all the wonderful features of the Kindle 2 and even made me interested in purchasing one--though I'm such a lover of the traditional book that such a purchase would feel like blasphemy. When I first heard about the Kindle, I immediately wondered about the death of the book, which according to many has been dying a slow death for years. But in actuality, the Kindle has the potential to help the book, albeit in e-form. But so what? Well, according to writer Roy Blount, Jr. in his NY Times op-ed piece "The Kindle Swindle," the Kindle is gypping writers out of their well-deserved audio rights. The Kindle can read books to its owner. With a CD audio book, the writer gets paid for that iteration of his/her work. Not so with the Kindle 2. This is problematic, but I'm choosing to see the growing popularity of the Kindle in a positive light. After all, as the NY Times article points out "in Technoland, nothing ever replaces anything. E-book readers won’t replace books. The iPhone won’t replace e-book readers. Everything just splinters. They will all thrive, serving their respective audiences." I'm inclined to agree with this assertion.

And as Dave Slusher points out in his blog Evil Genius Chronicles, Kindle reading is for books we don't want hard copies of. "I will not cease to buy paper copies of books, I’ll just refine the choices to the ones I know I want to keep continuing to own for a long time." The Kindle makes readers more deliberate in their choice of whether to read an electronic text or a hard copy text. Nothing wrong with that. The question then becomes for me, should I ever invest in a Kindle: what books would I read electronically? I can highlight and underline with a Kindle. So would I do my academic reading electronically but still curl up on the couch with a hard copy novel? Or am I so married to the pen and my love of scrawling marginalia that I would stick to hard copies for in-depth reading and leave my pleasure reading to the Kindle? Guess I'll have to experiment to figure out which form of reading is best accomplished with this adaptation of the book.

New Media Picks of the Week

"The Conversion" is a viral video produced by and starring our own Rob Magnesen. Let's help his video live up to its viral title. Give it a viewing--it's quite funny.

"Do We Need a New Internet" is a NY Times article about the future and (in)security of the Internet that I know some of you will find interesting. To be rather apocalyptic, we're much closer to the brink of a technological breakdown than I realized. Thanks to Andrew for the link.

"How to Make Sentences Clear and Concise" No, it's not especially new media, but this website does have some direct and simple suggestions for how to make your writing better, an important subject given your current project.

images by Guy Hoffman from The New York Times

Other people are typographically obsessed too

It's nice to know I'm not the only one who notices and ponders font choices.

Read about New Yorkers griping about subway fonts here.

See beautiful and amazing typefaces by Bodie and Fou here.

New Media Picks of the Week

This week we're focused on design issues including layout, color and typeface. How can text act as an image and influence the visual effect of any document? How does the arrangement of images on the page determine where the reader's eye lands? How does color influence a reader's experience of your content? Check out the links below as you consider these questions.

Typeface: the way the message is dressed

At The Visual Dictionary, you can explore words as pictures in the world.

This clip from the documentary Helvetica looks at the effect typeface has on us as readers and consumers.

In another clip from Helvetica. Designer Wim Crouwel takes about the purpose of typeface.

What font are you? Take this highly accurate quiz posted on the PBS website about the documentary Helvetica.


Color: more meaning than you think

Blog Solid (of interest to you hardcore bloggers) uses earth tones to connote their solidity. The tan on brown contrast is easy to read.

Sometimes less color is more visually effective. The black and white approach with hints of color that Diesel Jeans uses makes for a clean, eye- catching homepage.

This landscape company selected colors that pop and are slick, while also selecting hues that people associate with earth and water.


Layout: directing the gaze

Large type in the middle of the page can be an effective attention getter. It's quite clear who will be presenting at dConstruct, a conference on designing the social web.

Simplicity means focus as this director/cinematographer's website shows on his personal website.

This web designer uses a one page/ two column navigational approach. Not ideal for those of us who don't like to scroll, but easy for the eye to understand.

images from: Visualdictionary.net
http://plaza.ufl.edu/mmcadams/colorpages/images/color_wheel_full.gif
http://donhowardproductions.com/eye.JPG

Websites - the modern equivalent of the record?

As I consider the place of the web design project within the frame of this course, I can't help wondering whether writing and designing web pages is truly a new media act? If the word "new" is contextual and audience dependent when used in conjunction with the word "media," then web design isn't especially new. The members of the class have grown up with the Internet. Reading a web page is as normal to you as reading a book and is probably something you do with more frequency and ease than hard cover text reading. With that in mind, I revisited the various definitions of new media that we discussed in week two and began thinking more about the role of interactivity and multimedia in web pages. Are these the elements that make a website a new media text? According to my first Powerpoint presentation:


"Current new media texts draw attention to their materiality by mixing media (sound, image, video) and/or making the reader/viewer consider the materiality of the form as they read/experience. This seems directly linked to interactivity--the reader/viewer makes choices to navigate through the text and thus plays a role in constructing content."

So does the reader's role in determining his/her reading experience through self-navigation make a website a new media text? Please weigh in on these questions and let us know what will firmly place your website in the new media category.

New Media Picks of the Week - Poor Website Navigation

Today I discovered that there's a term for poor site navigation. According to Wikipedia:

Mystery meat navigation (also abbreviated MMN) is a term coined and popularized by author, web designer, and usability analyst Vincent Flanders to describe user interfaces (especially in websites) in which it is inordinately difficult for users to discern the destinations of navigational hyperlinks—or, in severe cases, even to determine where the hyperlinks are. The typical form of MMN is represented by menus composed of unrevealing icons that are replaced with explicative text only when the mouse cursor hovers over them.

This post is dedicated to providing examples of MMN. Here's what not to do on your website.

The Connext Project wants us to "see the music," but it's difficult to discern where we'll see it and what music we'll see because of the site design. The grid of links on the homepage also makes us think there's alot more content on the site than there actually is.

I'm assuming Leo Burnett is an advertising agency, though it's not entirely clear from their site, which uses Flash! Flash can be very visually exciting for the user/view, but on this site, the use of Flash interferes with clear and effective site navigation. And ironically, the tab at the bottom of the page that reads "Feeling Lost" provides a menu when you hover the mouse over it, though that menu disappears if you try to click on any of the items listed.

Texelate is the web site of a web designer, which I found surprising. The issue on this site is the number of menus. There's one at the top of the homepage, another on the right margin for the site's Blog and additional links in the center of the page. Admittedly, I prefer a left hand nav bar, probably because I'm left-handed. Regardless, the format and design of the homepage also made it difficult for me to decide where to start and what to read and to even clearly determine what serves this guy offered.

Blog Post #5: Best and Worst of the Web

This post will be due in a week (Tues., 2/10). For post #5, you will select two websites. One will be an example of stellar content, web architecture, and design and the other will be a poor example of the same three areas. Your post should analyze how content, architecture, and design are working (or are decidedly dysfunctional) in each site. You may choose to compare the sites you've chosen or write about them quite separately. Up to you. Specific details will be important to back up your analysis and to entice your blog readers to actually go check out these sites. I'm hoping to be thrilled by your best picks and disgusted by your worsts.

Image from: http://xpress101.files.wordpress.com/2007/04/my-hand.jpg