1. Good design is important, but content is king. I think most people – except maybe for out-of-work designers – would agree. I do believe the point bears repeating, however. It should become a mantra, chanted throughout the newsroom. Readers don’t care whether you use Arial or Franklin Gothic for your cutlines. They do care about getting good content and design that doesn’t get in the way.

2. Designers are important for setting up the format and overall layout and spacing guidelines, but are less important than reporters and editors to the day-to-day overall product. It almost pains me to write those words, but I think it is true. Push comes to shove, I would rather have writers and editors than designers.

3. Design cannot be treated as a cosmetic add-on after all the content has been gathered. Design concepts must be integrated into the newsgathering process from the very beginning. The best time to think about design is when the assignments are being made. Bring the visual people into the planning meetings. Don’t simply  hit them up on deadline for some clip art to “dress up” your story.

4. I don’t think people who lay out ad-free pages should worry about making each issue a completely unique set of pages. Readers don’t care, and the reality is only a handful of placements on pages work well any way. It would speed up the process to have a designer create a series of 5-6 templates and then get out of the way.

The copy desk folks could then call up the template that fit the best and make the few, small changes the content requires. No need to re-invent the wheel each issue and no need to pay designers to do layouts. That’s like paying police officers to be school crossing guards.

Pages with ads on them need designers even less. The ads pretty much limit what can be done beyond slotting in stories and packages in the space available. Again, get a designer to set up some standards and train the desk folks in the basics and be done with it.

5. I think newspaper designers worry too much about typeface, color and related issues that readers simply don’t care about. Although I think branding and user experience can be helpful in market differentiation, most newspapers have a monopoly. The web, magazines and television are competitors only if you stretch the term a bit.

There’s an understated beauty in black-and-white, and I think an all B&W newspaper could be successful. It would be an easier and slightly cheaper paper to produce. Every buck you could save would help.

I’d spend money on solving circulation problems and getting ink that doesn’t come off on your hands, clothes and tablecloths.

6. I think the Society for News Design has created this monster by (a) handing out thousands of awards each year, and (b) rewarding “pretty” when it should have been rewarding “successful.”

All those awards are ridiculous, and SND still pretty much ignores the vast majority of newspapers in the country, the small-circulation dailies and weeklies. It would be like handing out 15 Best Picture statues at the Oscars. Those awards remind me of the many self-congratulating awards that advertising folks hand out to one another in a number of competitions. The creative ads win, sure, but I want to know whether they succeeded in moving product. That’s a good ad.

–

If you need help with your newspaper design, contact me at News Design School.

This post in streaming audio. Right-click to download.

Download audio file (things-I-think.mp3)

We all know about shrinking newsroom staffs, ad sales and circulation numbers. That’s pretty old news by now. But newspaper designers are facing their own special challenges as more and more papers are moving from the broadsheet format — which itself has been shrinking toward the proportions of a reporter’s notebook — to the tabloid.

Readers seem to prefer the smaller size, and unlike media professionals, don’t seem to equate tabs to yellow journalism. Advertisers have been slower to embrace the tab. That frightens me a bit, because I believe a successful newspaper is going to have to please advertisers first, then bring the readers along.

But it hasn’t stopped at the tab. Papers in Europe, which seems to be leading the way in newspaper innovation, have devolved to the Berliner format (basically an 11 by 17) or even A4 size, the European equivalent of our letter-sized paper. The A4 is 8.3 by 11.7 inches.

But it doesn’t stop there. Jacek Utko, a Polish designer who gained some fame this year for a talk at the weekly TED conference (watch it at http://tinyurl.com/dc8l7y) , believes that newspapers, and those who design them, need to think even smaller, all the way down to mobile phones.

As with the move from bulky broadsheet to tab, the push is from readers who want portability and ease of use. People today are permanently attached, it seems, to their mobile phones, which are used more like portable information and communication devices than as telephones. The iPhone, for instance, is a great little text machine and web browser, but not so good as a phone. People don’t care. The phone part is secondary to them.

Tomorrow’s designer will have to create a structure for the news on less newsprint than ever before, and on web sites, digital readers (e.g., Kindle) and mobile phones.

When it comes to size, bigger may be better, but smaller appears to be winning the newspaper race.

—

If you need help with your newspaper design, contact me at News Design School.

This post in streaming audio. Right-click to download.

Download audio file (newspaper-shrinkage.mp3)

I believed — and still believe — that the best final presentation of information for the benefit and pleasure of the reader requires that the three not be conceptualized as separate tasks. All three must be worked on simultaneously or almost so.

For instance, if the writer is better informed about what the final presentation will look like, he or she will be able to gather the necessary facts. The editor needs to be part of the loop so that all the elements are pulled together consistently.  Then the designer, of course, completes the presentation with visual flair.

If each part is worked on in isolation of the others, the output will be less effective.

Awhile later, someone came up with a similar idea for newspapers called the “maestro” concept, and then more recently, we got W-E-D (thus, the title of this blog). Regardless of what it is called, the important thing is the concept.

Integrate the writing, editing and design into one process. That’s how you end up with the most effective design for your content.

Customers obviously wanted that. Product differentiation based on function and quality gave way to one based on aesthetics. As Postrel points out, this led to aesthetics taking on marginal economic value in our mass culture. For many, this meant that they would rather pay more, for instance, for a computer with a cool case than one with increased power or functionality. As Postrel put it, for a manufacturer, “adding pleasure may be more important than adding performance attributes.” So in our postmodern age, this has meant that everyone’s personal idea of beauty is valid and it thus has value in the marketplace. There is no absolute standard of beauty. My idea of beauty is just as good as anyone’s.

This increase of attention on aesthetics has given a fairly recent cultural focus on simply looking good. Postrel notes the increases in personal beauty enhancement products, day spas, nail salons, and so on. It has also meant that businesses give customers not just a handful of choices of some products, but hundreds, though not all of them truly attractive. It has meant that “designers” can give us 12-point, shadowed, underlined brown type on a deep purple background. (If it is on a web page, the type will blink next to 17 animated GIFs.) Postrel also insists that aesthetics should not be left to the professionals, thus implying that expert opinions are worthless and that everyone has the same level of expertise when it comes to separating the good from the bad. Give customers what they want, she says.

This is where we differ. Economically speaking, I think she is spot on. The best example I can think of is the iPod. A large part of its success lies not in its functional quality — which many believe has not always been up to the level of its design or of the functionality of its competitors — but in its aesthetics. iPods simply look cool, and the marketing pushes that angle, not how it works. There is no doubt that playing to a variety of consumer tastes makes good economic sense, but is it good for design and designers?

I think not. What has happened is a lot of bad design work has succeeded in the marketplace, even if it falls short of the standards of the professionally trained eye. This is where Design Darwinism has failed us. The Galapagos Islands finches survived through adaptation of the beak size and shape to the particular environment they were in. If your beak didn’t meet the “standard,” or the needs of the environment, you didn’t make it.

In today’s design world, the marketplace isn’t so cruel, the cultural environment not so unforgiving. A capitalist economic system allows anything that sells, and it doesn’t care if it is well-designed or not, as long as there are enough people who are willing to buy it. If bad design can find even a small corner of the market, which isn’t hard today largely because of the power of advertising and marketing over the minds of the great unwashed, it isn’t driven out by the good, as Design Darwinism would posit. It may even prosper. That’s why we are surrounded by not just the good designs, but the bad and the ugly.

Art is (or it should be) a value-free creation. It merely is. The artist had a vision of something and created a physical manifestation of that vision. Because the artist had no particular goal in mind, just the act of creation, no one truly has the right or ability to say art is good art or bad art. In that sense, what’s hanging on the fridge is equal to what’s hanging in the Louvre.

Designs, on the other hand, can be good or bad largely because of the functional nature of the concept. Looks aside, a chair, for instance, can be well-designed or poorly designed, good or bad, in terms of its ability to function as a chair. Art has no such functional component.

Here is where design gets interesting in a way many in the various design fields may not consider, and it brings us back to my previous point (below, Aug. 11 and 22) that design is not a single concept, but a bifurcated one. I want to expand on my earlier ideas.

Design includes both a functional component and an aesthetic one. Art is concerned only with aesthetics. I heard an Infiniti commercial recently that touched upon the idea that the car must be both functional and beautiful. But I don’t hear the functional/aesthetic split discussed much, at least not among the graphic designers I hang around with. I think it helps explain, however, why we see so much bad design.

First, all designs must attain a certain level of functional competency before they can be deemed good or even acceptable. Going back to our chair example, it must be able to function at least minimally at holding up a bent human form to even be called a chair. If you can’t sit on it, it isn’t a chair. In a sense, this functional aspect of design is integral to any concept and in fact arises instantly with the observation and naming of it. In other words, just by saying or even thinking chair or fan or ad or shoe or building, the functional nature of the item is in play. Everyone can have the ability to judge a design as good or bad on its functional characteristics.

Judgment of the aesthetic side of design is where it begins to get interesting.

Aesthetics, or the theory of beauty, according to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, is a huge field that has been around since antiquity. It didn’t really blossom until leisure activities became more prevalent in the eighteenth century, and modern discussions only go back to about the 1960s. I’m no philosopher, and I don’t want to play one on the web. I also don’t want to get into any of the various philosophical arguments about aesthetics, but I do want to side with those who believe it takes a special sensibility, not shared by all, to see beauty. Again, anyone can judge whether a chair or a brochure or a building is good in terms of its functional characteristics and maybe even whether it is gaudy, dull or elegant, which some consider secondary aesthetic characteristics. But the ability to recognize beauty in physical forms is simply a trait that not all possess.

It is, however, a trait that people believe they possess. When someone says a design is good (and most people include both the functional and the aesthetic when they do so), he or she doesn’t believe a personal, subjective opinion is being shared, but that an accepted Truth is being illuminated. When they say, “That is well designed,” they don’t think they are saying, “I like that design” or “I think that is a good design.” In other words, anyone who utters such a statement believes that their personal recognition of beauty in the design of whatever they are looking at is universal and that they are merely stating the obvious. This brings us back around to the plethora of bad design in the world: the marketplace has found it can exploit the notion that everyone has good taste.

Virginia Postrel, in her 2003 book The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetics Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness, said that we are living in an age of aesthetics. She said that, because of improvements ….(more to come)

Part 2 –  http://robertbohle.com/blog/2006/11/28/why-we-have-bad-design-part-2/