More a picture book than a helpful textbook
News Design: Reader engagement is the biggest challenge for journalism websites. Two industry professionals show what web designers have come up with—but that’s about it.
News design Readership retention is the tricky part for journalistic websites. Two practitioners show what web designers have come up with - but nothing more.Reading a newspaper means leafing through it. Articles and advertisements vie for attention with headlines and images. On the Internet, however, there is nothing to browse through. Websites have no back pages. If you want to get your news to the people online, you have to try out other ways.Alexander Kranz and Ricarda Stiller present practical solution strategies in "News-Sites. Design and Journalism". In the first part of the (illustrated) book, homepages and follow-up pages of around 60 online news services worldwide are illustrated; in their analysis, the authors evaluate the approaches to Internet-specific problems in news design. They draw on their experience as designers and journalists at Stuttgarter Nachrichten Online.
Design, navigation and content: The authors divide the "tricks of the trade" into these categories with which a news website aims to entice its visitors to stay as long as possible. The most space is given to design issues. These range from the integration of the CD to the creation of effective teaser images and web-specific typography to the choice and dosage of color.
The reader will miss a prior analysis of the actual information structure, which should be the starting point for any navigation and essentially determine its design. Advertising, which is vital for journalistic websites, also receives hardly any attention.
The tendency towards superficiality is not an isolated case. For example, the color chapter refers to the teachings of the Swiss art teacher Johannes Itten without explaining the basics or at least referring to further literature. The result is a kind of snipping book for web designers. How to get users to consult a website beyond the homepage cannot be learned from this oeuvre.
> News sites. Design and Journalism by Alexander Kranz and Ricarda Stiller (with CD-ROM). Springer Verlag, Berlin 2003. 242 pages, Fr. 80.-.
Stefano Monachesi
Design, navigation and content: The authors divide the "tricks of the trade" into these categories with which a news website aims to entice its visitors to stay as long as possible. The most space is given to design issues. These range from the integration of the CD to the creation of effective teaser images and web-specific typography to the choice and dosage of color.
The reader will miss a prior analysis of the actual information structure, which should be the starting point for any navigation and essentially determine its design. Advertising, which is vital for journalistic websites, also receives hardly any attention.
The tendency towards superficiality is not an isolated case. For example, the color chapter refers to the teachings of the Swiss art teacher Johannes Itten without explaining the basics or at least referring to further literature. The result is a kind of snipping book for web designers. How to get users to consult a website beyond the homepage cannot be learned from this oeuvre.
> News sites. Design and Journalism by Alexander Kranz and Ricarda Stiller (with CD-ROM). Springer Verlag, Berlin 2003. 242 pages, Fr. 80.-.
Stefano Monachesi
