In an article from last summer, the New York Times published an interactive graphic on the Israeli assault underway in Gaza, presenting a biased version of the events through data visualization. Data journalism is often perceived as less biased than traditional written journalism, but the article serves as a reminder of the red flags to […]

ESPN has launched its first redesign since 2009, with a streamlined design, lots of white space and a responsive layout. The website is personalized and designed to feature more content each user will be interested in. Besides being simply responsive, the design is also adaptable, allowing ESPN to feature content such as live scores more […]

NYT’s Mat Yurow says that a few years ago, he too would have been “emphatic” that all web developers should be building sites with responsive design. In this essay, Yurow says he’s changed his mind: a responsive design, which is the same across all platforms and devices, assumes that users have the same goals on […]

Josh Benton writes about Melody Kramer’s experiment to think about what a good news design would look like for Betty, her 89-year-old neighbor. Kramer’s post about watching Betty look for news on her iPad (over tea) contextualized her experiment: there are 13 million people age 75 to 84 and 5 million between 85 and 94 […]

Wes Lindamood writes about the evolution of NPR’s picture stories and how the storytelling vision gets integrated with the web design. Regarding the storytelling, Lindamood notes how to avoid cluttered special story formats, those which may have attractive pieces but aren’t cohesive. Instead, identify a dominant media type (e.g. visual or audio) and enhance its […]

The news environment today requires tweaking, iterations and major redesigns, but audiences may not understand. In this interview on INN’s name change, rebranding and web redesign, INN design director Kaeti Hinck describes how documentation and explanation can be difficult (“especially when you’re neck-deep in the middle of launching a project”), but benefits are clear. “Nobody […]

You might have heard: The Los Angeles Times’ redesign adopted endless scroll as a design element to encourage readers to read more stories, as have others But did you know: Wired’s new site had no endless scroll because of ad integration. Others cite ad viewability difficulties. Forbes plans to remove its endless scroll functionality because […]

NPR recently ran controlled experiments live on its site, testing whether a small design tweak would prompt more users to “take action” on a Support NPR button. Tyler Fisher and Livia Labate write about how this worked: in one case they constructed two versions of the page, one of which was the “control” and placed […]

Mindy McAdams helped judge the Society for News Design’s Best of Digital Design awards and highlights the trends she saw, including the “not-so-good” entries that were rejected “often quickly.” This included entries that were “cover” pieces — those that looked nice at first glance but then only linked to regular article pages — and entries […]

Before digital, designing was more of a blind process. In this essay on new White House chief data scientist DJ Patil’s previous role at Greylock, John Lilly discusses how better understanding data improves the design process. Teams used to spend “a lot of time on ethnography, need finding, doing paper prototypes and then doing basic […]