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!

Via @gcstaublin via beta.boston.com via /r/boston

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.

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:

• Finding the Look & Feel of BostonGlobe.com
• How to Approach a Responsive Design
• Portfolio Entry

Spring is here! And that means summer is almost here too. And that means it’s time to apply for our summer internship at Upstatement. We’ve had some great interns in the past couple of years, and are looking forward to working with the next generation.

We’re looking for someone that fits well with our sensibilities and the type of work we do. If you like journalism, museums, and content-focused design, that’s what we’re looking for. We like to work with people who have ideas, and aren’t afraid to take a stand and back up their theories. Strong editorial design skills and experience working in HTML and CSS are a must.

Over the summer you’ll work closely with our team on a variety of client and internal projects. We’ve got some great work with some neat clients coming up, as well as loads of internal projects including Glyphosaurus. We’re paying $4000 for the 10 week internship, start date is flexible.

Send your website/portfolio url to everybody@upstatement.com by April 27.

I’ve been using the iPad a lot more lately, after commandeering it from Upstatement and really trying to immerse myself in it. Some things are awesome: Angry Birds Space, Ableton Live control with TouchOSC, and the the ability to read the internet without a bulky computer.

But, some things are not so awesome. I’m really surprised at the amount of news and reading apps (iBooks: why!?!) that force the user to “card” or page through sections of type, instead of scroll. Information Architects has an oft-referenced post on this very idea, and they nail it. Scrolling is calmer, easier, and more natural for a digital device.

Fig. 1 The red circle is your gaze area, in this example on a columnar/paginated reading app

I’ve been trying to observe my behaviors in these apps, and the thing that gets me most about the carding approach is how it forces me to move my eyes across the page, constantly tracking type, moving like a guy mowing his lawn. First-world problems, I know, but it really is distracting. And most annoyingly, it’s totally unnecessary.

Fig. 2 Gaze remains centered, content scrolls past.

I find scrolling much more natural. My gaze remains fixed on the type area of the device, not continuously searching around the page. When I look away to one of the corners, it’s to find navigation elements. This type of focus keeps the user engaged with the reading area, and is less distracting. It also gives us more room and flexibility as designers, instead of artificially working within a fixed area to fit navigation, teases, ads and content, we create an unlimited amount of digital real estate and free ourselves from the borders and the frame of the device.

Columnar text, page sizes, and even pages themselves are solutions to the constraints of the format. Long scrolls of parchment are unwieldy, but books are small and compact. They can be read comfortably while atop a horse, or in your fancy autocar.

I love books and newspapers, but their familiar concepts are bugs, not features. Applying this type of medieval usability to our futuristic digital tablets is holding us back.

Longtime Upstatement client CFY announced today that they secured $7 million in funding from the Broad, Kellogg and Gates foundations. The money will be used to continue developing features and content for the PowerMyLearning.com platform.

Beginning in 2010, Upstatement designed and built PowerMyLearning.com from the ground up with the help of our friends at Digital Loom. It was a really interesting project unlike anything we’ve ever worked on. The site is aimed at parents and students who have never owned a computer before. The unique challenge of creating a site for this group and teachers who are trying to facilitate learning taught us a lot about “usability for the 99%.” We had to make decisions that would make sense to users who weren’t familiar with common usability conventions we sometimes take for granted.

Look for great things to come from CFY and the PowerMyLearning team!

Our portfolio entry: http://upstatement.com/portfolio/power-my-learning/

CFY’s press release: http://cfy.org/2012/04/cfy-awarded-millions-from-broad-kellogg-and-gates-foundations/

In Fall of 2011 Pat and Elliott from The Lincoln Arts Project asked if I’d be interested in setting up a poster show the following Spring. Enthusiastic to get the ball rolling I emailed 40 of the 60 artist the very next morning and started to picture what the gallery walls would look like covered in hand printed posters.

The idea for the show was simple, celebrate event posters and the awesome moments in time they represent. To get into the show work only had to meet two requirements: be printed by hand and represent an event of some kind. This didn’t just mean rock shows but cookouts, wiffle ball tournaments, bike rides and everything else in between. With 50+ artists on board and 150+ pieces on the wall, the show opened on March 14th. The reception was a blast, so much work was sold even hours before the actual reception and as I’m writing this now the show is a few posters away from being completely sold out! In addition, one of the added bonuses of curating an event like this was being in room filled with people from just about every era of my life, new friends and other poster enthusiasts. Such a cool and kind of surreal moment.

The National Poster Retrospecticus runs through April 14th. If you miss the show this year you can look forward to it again in 2013 (how’s that for a subtle hint)!

In the eyes of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Upstatement turned 4 on Sunday! This last year has been a great one, filled with fun times, great projects, new friends and a whole bunch of Blades of Steel. Thanks to everyone for sticking with us through the years, and to all of our clients who make this possible!