Good News Everyone!

S

ome cool things have been happening around these parts -- a few involving posters. First, a commercial hyping a new shoe by Adidas that was made to air during the NFL Draft was recently posted on the world wide internerd. If you look carefully enough around the 18 second mark, you can spot show posters (dating back to 1999!) that my bud Mike Swiatlowski and I made hanging on the walls of one of the sets. It's only a two second shot, so stay sharp!



In other fun poster news I've been asked to be the third member on the "Exploring Contemporary Poster Design Panel" this Sunday, April 29th at 12pm at the Somerville Theater. The panel is a supplemental part of the screening of Just Like Being There at the Boston Independent Film Festival. Also on the panel: Daniel Danger, poster guru and bandmate (back before I was old enough to drive) and Scout Shannon, director of the film. If you're free this Sunday consider checking out the discussion and / or the movie. It should be rad!

Maybe That’s How Come Everybody’s Reading the Globe These Days

Portrait day at Upstatement

We're tweaking our site a bit, and John designed an awesome new about page for when we relaunch it. We needed some "professional" looking portraits, so we went down the Calumet and rented a seamless and strobe kit. Hilarity ensued!

SND Digital Judges Statement: My Favorite Part

On Friday it was revealed that Bostonglobe.com was awarded the "World's Best Website" distinction in the SND digital competition. We're psyched. My favorite part though is in the Judges Statement:

For mobile entries: Although there were many intriguing mobile and tablet entries these apps did not seem to universally embrace the touch-medium. More needs to be done to make news apps the polished equivalent of the web-based entries. Touch-based news apps should take special care with multimedia elements. These apps should better fulfill their different place in the lives of their users and address specific needs, not just replicating print or web-based experiences. The focus on the user, awareness of load times, intuitive interfaces and touch interaction and crash-resistance of innovative news tools far outpaces what most news organizations are doing themselves. More experimentation, more awareness of the user, is needed from the companies that produce the news.

I'm glad that SND commented on this, and it's something I've been noticing too. We have an iPad at Upstatement for testing sites we work on, but i'm not an iPad owner myself. I've been trying though, and I've found it really fun and useful for general internet browsing, gaming and music creation. But what's been really lacking is the news/magazine value.

I went on a spree of downloading tons of newspaper, news channel and news startup apps. For the most part, they are really unimaginative, and seem to be at the old business of shoehorning print conventions into a digital device. Which is a problem, because a piece of paper like the New Yorker or Wired or even the NYT is still cheaper, easier to read and honestly more beautiful than their pixel dopplegangers.

I've ranted about this before, but I thought it was cool to see that SND called it out in their statement. We're trying to be more inventive and digital-native with our projects here at Upstatement, and I think publications and readers would both benefit from a little more imagination.

Bostonglobe.com: World’s Best Designed Website

The Society for News Design announced today that BostonGlobe.com has been named the World's Best Designed Website in their digital competition. Hot damn!

Those SND awards meant a lot to us before we hung up our newspaper spurs, and as students at the turn of the 21st century we would dream about designing a newspaper page that would win us a silver, or be still my heart, a gold.

A lot has happened between 2002 and 2012, and most of it can just be summed up as "the Internet." But I remember entering my first feature page and watching it be judged in Syracuse. I thought it was a shoe-in. The type of newspaper page you tell your grandkids about (I actually thought that). Well, it didn't win. It got 2 chips, but the judges passed on it. And I pouted like a mofo to my girlfriend at the time (now she's my wife!).

This is a really cool moment for us, and means more than a Webby, or an AIGA award or something like that. We grew up with SND, learned from it, and vied for the affection of its stars (Whatup Zedek, Klee, Dorsey, Kordalski and Emmet Smith!).

Eventually though it felt like we left it behind when we started working on the web. But now it's back, and it feels like a real turning point for the industry. Do I think the Globe is the World's Best Designed website? Is it really the best possible design of all the websites in the world? (there are probably at least 1,000 websites as of this writing). No, probably not.

Did the project succeed because of our unrivaled design genius, devil-may-care attitude and handsome-but-not-too-handsome looks? I'll let you figure that one out. I know there are tons of great designers at newspapers with really great ideas sitting in their drawers gathering dust. They just need to be listened to.

This is a referendum on newspapers and how they approach the web and their businesses. Do something different! Listen to what people outside the executive suite have to say! Try harder!

The Globe won this award because they tried harder, and succeeded. They did something really ballsy (technical term) and it turned out well. They put together a great team in Miranda, Ethan, Scott, Mat, Todd, Patty and the Filament Group. And they didn't let it get screwed up by a committee or the bugaboos of a scared, old institution.

The Globe took the first step to transforming a culture, and other papers and media groups will follow. It's a great time to be in news design, and I'm really excited to see all the amazing work that gets greenlighted because of this breakthrough project.

If you've somehow not gotten enough coverage of this project, check out our blog posts: