Monday, February 09, 2009
Real design is more than graphic design
IFRA, a research organization for the news industry, has a Q&A with Jacek Utko, who made a splash at TED with his talk on newspaper redesign.
Newspapers are clearly having trouble connecting with audiences. Because their business is the presentation of information, anyone with a large Web site can learn from their struggles and successes.
One of the challenges corporations face as they market on the Web is turning their businesses into publishing operations. Most businesses (unlike newspapers) see content and publishing as a necessary cost of doing business, a support function to the core operation of creating products or services that people will buy.
The information revolution and the Internet have made publishing critical to nearly all industries. Unfortunately, the experience with online information is too short and expertise at companies in information and interaction design too rare to enable companies to easily gain a competitive advantage through the way they present their information.
What happens? Too often it is a visceral reaction to a graphic design that drives the process. Utko, whose redesigns have resulted in some large circulation gains, talks about what "design" really means:
It usually takes a few weeks for the strategy and then around one month for the content discussions, and then you start designing. So, actually almost two months are spent on discussions not about design, but for the other things, and I’m usually very active in this part. I’m not just waiting for: ‘What are they going to say?’ ‘What are they going to tell me?’
I’m a part of the process from the very beginning because I don’t believe in a redesign that looks good, but it doesn’t help sales, because that’s a bad experience for all of us.
posted by Tim Beidel at 2/09/2009 01:08:00 PM
