Courtesy What’s Next

(I’d normally put in a thumbnail, but my computer is experiencing…issues.)

*”Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?”
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Juan Antonio Giner’s "What’s Next" blog shows us how major newspapers used infographics to support their coverage of the economic downturn (the honesty of calling a recession a crash is debatable). A highly useful display. It demonstrates, again, how just a little thought outside the text-and-photos box can help our readers immensely.

My favorites are the Virginian-Pilot (excerpted above) and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Both grab the reader with the "what’s next for you" approach.

Link: THE CRASH IN THE FRONT PAGES at WHAT’S NEXT: INNOVATIONS IN NEWSPAPERS.

Link: Death and Taxes: A Visual Guide to Where Your Federal Tax Dollars Go.

Graphic journalism works by representing through images and text information that either alone cannot explain efficiently. This is one of the best examples: both beautiful and deeply useful. It works, in a way, on the Web, but obviously must be seen in print for full effect.

From the Web site:

“Death and Taxes” is a representational graph of the federal discretionary budget. The amount of money that is spent at the discretion of your elected representatives in Congress. Basically, your federal income taxes.

The data is from the President’s annual budget proposal but it must pass both the House and Senate before it goes into effect.

While “Death and Taxes” contains an enormous amount of information, the purpose of the graph is to generate questions. The right questions. Your taxes are being spent in your name and mostly likely you are unaware exactly what they are used for. This “Death and Taxes” will hopefully answer that “what” question.

The next question that should be asked is “why”?

Somewhere, Edward Tufte, the Princeton professor who has made "beautiful information" his life’s work, must be grinning.

Once in a while, an issue of a newspaper or magazine approaches the ideal of what it could be. The Fall 2006 EurArmy (almost 7 MB .pdf file) is an example. There is practically nothing to criticize here, but plenty to learn about photography, writing and design to those who care to learn. Or download it for the pleasure of seeing what a beautifully edited publication can be. Hats off to Ray Johnson and his team.

One gripe: making your publication available only via .pdf penalizes those with slow or bad connections. It masks the product of your labor from search engines. It reduces its value to your customers and command. Always make an HTML alternative available. End sermon.

DanCentury.com offers a neat little field guide to help us identify the ripest bologna in the wild and eradicate it from our pages:

Link: Last Dance of the Web Bologna.

"Dancing bologna" existed well before the web was commercialized and oversold: as long as there’s been graphical browsers, like pioneers Mosaic and Netscape, there’s been "dancing bologna". In the early days of the web, people loaded their web sites with every conceivable doodad and gismo: they didn’t care that it took ten minutes to download the page, or that it looked something like a Las Vegas at Christmas time, "on acid". Almost ten years later, people are still festooning their pages with Elton John midi files, dancing smiley faces, and browser-crashing Java applets – if you don’t believe me, take a trip to Geocities. When it comes to dancing web bologna, few are innocent, but we are all victims. You will find many of the more infamous and obnoxious "dancing bologna" chronicled below. Read and learn from the mistakes of the past.

I’ll let the link speak for itself.

Is this your newspaper?

It could be, with a little creativity, the right design staff and top-notch software. OK, we can’t afford the staff or the software, but creativity is free (and easy to rip off).

That’s why looking at what professionals are doing help us develop. It’s good to examine other military pubs for good ideas (and to know what everyone’s up to), but to really develop, we owe it to our readers to set our sights higher.

Even better is an opportunity to "listen in" as top pros critique each other’s work. That’s what we have with Newsdesigner.com, the blog of Mark Friesen, a news designer at the Portland Oregonian (does that ring a bell to Tim Harrower fans?). It’s frequently updated and features .jpg images of the front pages of many of the most influential newspapers in the country.

Visit. Read. Think. Steal.