“We’re thrilled to have the legendary graphic designer and theorist as the keynote speaker,” said Matt Mansfield, SND’s president. “Nigel’s work visually explaining the world has informed a generation — and as increasingly complex topics continue to dominate the news, his unique approach to making the difficult easier to understand seems more vital than ever.”

VIDEO OF NEW YORK TALK

Holmes talked about the current “mess we’re in” and how remaining passionate in the face of the current crisis may be the best defense at our SNDNYC meetup this spring at The New York Times.

MALOFIEJ INTERVIEW

Condé Nast’s John Grimwade sat down for an extensive interview with Holmes in 2004. Most of the images you see below can be found in the 22-page interview that was published in the annual Malofiej Information Graphics book.

Were you interested in graphics from an early age?

Yes, like a lot of English children growing up in the forties and fifties (I was born in 1942), I waited eagerly every week for a large-format comic called the Eagle, which, along with the usual kind of comic strips (ones that told stories of adventure in space or the wild west), had great cutaway drawings of buildings, racing cars, tanks, airplanes and so on. Many of these wonderful explanations were drawn by L. Ashwell Wood, and they occupied the coveted center spread of the comic.

The only member of my family to be involved with art was my great-uncle George. He did plans and elevations of British sailing vessels, some of which I was given as reference for a feature in the Observer magazine about regional boats (pictured above). It was only later that I realized who had done the reference drawings. For as long as I can remember, there was a map of a local Yorkshire river and the bridges over it drawn by George Holmes hanging in our living room. I was fascinated by the overhead plan view of the river, with three-dimensional views of the bridges crossing it. It was both a bird’s eye view and a human’s view presented in one picture. Nowadays that is commonplace, of course, but to a 6-year-old child in 1948 it was a revelation.

Where were you educated?

When Great Uncle George died, he left money to my father to educate my brother and I at one of England’s “public” schools. I was there from 1955 to 1960. I hated it. But then I went to Hull College of Art and had a great time. In 1963, I was accepted at the Royal College of Art, in London, to study illustration.

When did you decide to work in information graphics?

In 1964. My first graphics mentor was Brian Haynes (who had been at the RCA himself). He was then the art director of the London Sunday Times Magazine, and he was busy breaking down the walls between the art department and the writers. He did great work in the field of explanations. He would combine photos, maps, diagrams, extended captions and illustrations to make news stories clear. And Brian’s output was the entire story, there was no accompanying written piece. One example I remember was a visual description of the “Great Train Robbery”, a notorious crime that fascinated Britain in 1963.

Brian hired me to work as his assistant in the summer months of 1964, and I learned more from him in the short time I was there than I did in the three years at the Royal College. Brian convinced me that I wasn’t a very good illustrator, but that there was a real need for graphics that explained things. (I don’t think anyone called them information graphics at the time.)

When I went back at college after the summer, I just wanted to do “real” work instead of the somewhat irrelevant college exercises we were set.

Much to the college authorities’ disgust, I did just that, accepting freelance commissions from Brian Haynes when he moved to other magazines. For one of these jobs, Brian teamed me up with Peter Sullivan to do a large piece about Buckingham Palace (pictured above). Peter made wooden models of the floors of the palace, and had them photographed, and I did the opening double page color diagram of the Queen’s household staff–little drawings of people arranged in the front courtyard of the Palace, 200 of them, including all the footmen, nannies, chefs, clerks and ladies of the bedchamber, and everyone else involved with running the Royal Palace. The drawings weren’t very good, but I learned a huge amount from working with Peter Sullivan.

To show its displeasure that I was doing freelance work, the College only just allowed me to graduate. They gave me a “pass”–the lowest possible grade. Unfortunately for them, before they knew about my moonlighting, they had awarded me a traveling scholarship to America. And so in 1966, I traveled all over the States for four months.

Did you dream of doing something else?

Oh yes. As a child I had wanted to be a jockey, then a show jumper. My mother ran a riding school in Yorkshire, and I grew up on horseback (when I wasn’t reading the Eagle). Much later, when I started to do freelance work for the Radio Times, I took every chance to draw horses for them. Luckily English TV viewers were crazy about show jumping and horse racing.

Starting around age 13, I wanted to be a jazz drummer, and while I was at Hull College of Art, I played for a while in a small jazz band. Today I have a drumset permanently set up in my basement, but I am no better now than I was then! I still daydream of being at a jazz club when the drummer in the Thelonius Monk group falls ill and I have to step in to take his place.

What were the major influences on you? Who in the graphics field has influenced you the most?

Three very important art directors, to whom I am eternally grateful: Brian Haynes; David Driver (at the Radio Times in London); Walter Bernard (at Time Magazine in New York.)

Graphic influences: Quentin Blake and Paul Hogarth (illustrators and teachers at the Royal College of Art); Otto Neurath and Gerd Arntz; poster artists Abram Games and F.H.K. Henrion; Ronald Searle; Andre Francois; Radio Times artists from the 60s; Eric Gill (who also designed the best typeface in the world, Gill Sans); L. Ashwell Wood (those center spreads in the Eagle); Harry Beck (he created the London Underground map), Edward Muybridge (eccentric 19th century English photographer who took sequential pictures of animals and humans in motion.)

Artists: Eric Ravillious (great wood engravings and watercolors of England); Amedeo Modigliani (wow!…the sexiest nudes ever painted); Stanley Spencer (quirky English types); Kurt Schwitters (as a student, I made hundreds of scrap paper collages, copying his technique); Paolo Uccello (who, around 1450, was one of the first to grapple with perspective, mixing flat 2-D figures with perspective views in his paintings.)

Other dead people I wish I could meet: Alberto Giacometti, Thelonius Monk (I admire both for their pared-down, but odd, simplicity.) And I would like to talk to the artists who painted the Lascaux and Chauvet Caves, to find out what they were thinking.

Why did you move to the United States?

I came for an exploratory visit in 1977, mistakenly thinking that I could get freelance work that I would actually do back in England. I also wanted to earn more money than I was making in England working for myself.

I wrote a kind of fan letter to Walter Bernard whose redesigned Time Magazine had caused a minor sensation within the design community in England. Walter invited me to do some freelance work while I was in America. And when it was time for me to go home he offered me a permanent job, but I had to return to England while the necessary work visa was arranged, so I officially started at Time in March 1978. Amazingly, both the Radio Times and Time used the same typefaces: Times Roman and Franklin Gothic, and that greatly helped me to relax into the new job.

Looking back, how do feel about your years as Graphics Director of Time magazine?

It was an amazing place to be, and a great shop window for doing outside work, which was actually encouraged–the people at the top wanted us to be happy and busy, and they were proud that their writers and artists represented them in forums other than the magazine. (It was assumed that you just had to drop everything whenever it was time to work for the magazine.

So anyway, I did a great deal of freelance work, spoke at many conferences, wrote three books, and ran an information graphics workshop at the Rhode Island School of Design for 10 years, as well as working really long hours at the magazine. I loved it, and I loved being in America.

A really great thing about working at Time was that the map and chart department had its own permanent researchers, so I could concentrate on making the information understandable, knowing that the facts would always be exhaustively checked. (That’s the thing I miss most about working by myself, now.) Looking back, I can see that my best work at Time was from 1978 to 1988, before I started using a computer. Of course there are pieces from those years that I wouldn’t want anyone to see now! They were overdone, and sometimes my drawings got in the way of the information. But they were only out there for a week, and the next week I had another chance. Walter was a great mentor and still is a great friend. He helped me to bridge the gap between the art department and the editorial department, and together with the magazine’s editor Ray Cave, he urged me to improve on the sketches I showed them. Those two were invariably right in their suggestions, and they were truly an inspiration.

In my later years at Time, I was promoted and became bogged down with administration tasks, and had less time to do the actual work.

I think I should have left the magazine two or three years earlier than I did. Much of my work there after the introduction of computers was not very good. I suppose I thought having a computer would save time, saving me from laboriously drawing everything by hand, and cutting amberliths (Actually I had the best assistant anyone could have wanted, Nino Telac, and he did all the ambertlith cutting, and much more). Only when I left Time did I realize that it takes just as long—if not longer—to draw something properly on the computer as it does the old fashioned way.

Why did you leave Time?

Anyone who lasted 15 years there got a chance to take a six-month sabbatical (at half pay). I made it to 16 years but then I had to stop. Within weeks of starting this “holiday” I knew I’d never go back. They were very decent about it and allowed me to take the break (and the money) without going back to work there–although they tried very hard to get me back!

I had built up a healthy freelance business and found it quite easy to survive on my own. I did all sorts of work for many different clients (including Time). It was a wonderful release to be able to work in formats that were larger than the standard magazine page size, and with subjects that did not start with the week’s news.

Your graphics begin on paper. Can you explain how this traditional approach fits into the world of computers and illustration programs?

Everything still starts on paper, and usually in a smallish notebook/sketchbook. All my very first drawn ideas and written notes are in these books, which I have kept carefully over many years and often refer back to. There are many as yet uncompleted projects in them as well as day-to-day sketches and roughs for current jobs.

When I have a workable idea for a particular job, I’ll usually draw it out again larger; probably go through two or three more versions using tracing paper, until it’s pretty tight, and then scan it. Then I use the computer to construct the drawing in exactly the same way I used to use french curves and templates to create lines when I did not have a computer. I never use the computer’s autotracing feature.

I started using Freehand at Time and still do. I use no other computer programs (except Word, for writing), and I’m probably only using about 10% of the potential of Freehand, but that’s all I need. It keeps the finished work simple. I’m not against computers–they enabled me to leave the corporate world and work by myself–but they are dreadfully misused, to my mind, in information graphics today. I think the computer should be used to take stuff out of an information graphic, rather than loading it up with special effects.

In recent years we have seen a huge growth in the use of 3-D illustration. What place is there for a simpler, more graphic approach?

Well, 3-D and surface effects are what I was just talking about. The fact that we see it everywhere is just a result of computers making it possible–whenever a new toy comes out, people want to play with it. But 3-D illustration is just a phase. While it will remain part of an artist’s arsenal of tools, it will pass away as the prevailing trend for infographics, as all fashions do: the fashion for flat, cartoony illustrations, like some that I did at Time, passed. Actually it passed before I left Time, and my efforts to do simpler work at the magazine ran up against opposition from editors there. I think that’s why they so eagerly embraced the arrival of 3-D programs after I left; they needed the graphics to have “more to them” than the information itself. But as one who had sometimes dressed up charts fifteen years earlier, I was hardly in a position to criticize the new fashion. Many people had criticized my work as overdone.

When I first left Time, some clients asked me to dress up the work I did for them (I refused; they got another artist!), but now I’m finding a renewed acceptance for simpler work. While some magazines still overdesign their graphics, other clients are getting back to basics. That suits me (and I believe it suits the information, too). I hope we’ll see a return to what I think is the basis of good information design; that is, not treating every job as a showcase for computer effects, but instead paying attention to what information is to be passed along.

You are widely respected for your work with pictograms. How important is the pictogram in information graphics?

A couple of years ago I wrote a piece on pictograms for the Information Design Journal, and it made me think about symbols again. I had written a book (Designing Pictorial Symbols, 1985), but that was largely about icons I’d drawn for Time. Here I realized that one way we make information graphics is by using little pictograms as building blocks for entire illustrations. We each create our own personal visual language—little bits that we recycle again and again. And as long as it is our own language, it’s fine to recycle; in fact it defines our style.

I’m on the fence about everyone adopting one universal visual symbol language, because that suggests that we would all use the same icons (like an alphabet), and while I want people all over the world to understand what I have drawn, I’m not yet ready to give up personal style for a committee-accepted set of pictograms. I hope one day to do some work in the field of completely wordless diagrams, especially if it is for a cause such as helping those in third-world countries who are unable to read.

What do you think are the most important fundamental rules for our business?

I hate rules! They put straightjackets around freedom of expression. However, I guess I do have some personal rules of my own. The first is that the best way to explain things is always the simplest way.

Keeping things simple and clear does not mean dumbing down information, nor does it mean making it look boring and austere. That is why Art is important. I mean Art in the service of information, not art for art’s sake. Sometimes Art might mean just beautiful simplicity. At other times it might mean wit, or humor, or fun. My fundamental mantra is enjoyable clarity.

One thing that often seems wrong with information graphics is the use of too much color. These days, I like to start a job with very little color and only add it when the information demands it. Of course, many editors and art directors still think of information graphics as a sort of colorful decoration for their pages. While the arguments are obvious to me, nothing I say seems to convince them. The rule is: only use color when it’s needed (and get your arguments lined up!)

Over your career, which work has given you the most satisfaction?

During two periods: my freelance work at the Radio Times in the early 70s, and my first years at Time. But I am always hopeful that the best is yet to come!

In the whole wide world of graphics, who do you most admire?

Otto Neurath and his brilliant designer/artist Gerd Arntz.

What are questions every information graphics designer should ask?

What’s the point of the graphic I am doing? What information does the reader/user need to know?

I think many graphics are too big. Perhaps we designers should ask for less space when that’s all we need. So ask this question: what is really the best size for this graphic?

Why is information graphics still a second-tier job in the area of graphic design?

Firstly, because most people can’t do information graphics and don’t understand what is involved in making them. They are therefore relegated to the bottom of the pile, and dashed off without much thought. Most art directors (at magazines and papers that do not have information graphics directors) won’t spend the time conceiving good information graphics, so they make as many excuses as possible for why information graphics should not appear in their magazines.

Secondly, there are relatively few information graphics produced that can compete at the same level of visual excitement with other forms of graphic design (illustrations, posters, book jackets, etc). So information graphics do not have the same place at design conferences, in design competitions, and within design organizations. I don’t like design competitions much, but the results of them are one indication to editors that someone is recognizing your work.

In many cases, the best information design is the workhorse of the design field—it just goes about its job without getting much recognition or thanks. It’s taken for granted. A diagram here, a map there, a chart; to many people these things are “necessary”, but don’t have to be regarded as anything special.

Until we can convince the graphic design world, (and then the rest of the world), that information graphics is an important part of the graphics community, we’ll be sidelined.

After 40 years of doing information graphics, what’s in the future for you?

I’m trying to doing more of what I want to do—writing and drawing—rather than what a magazine or some other type of client asks me to do. But I still have to earn a living, so I’ll continue with my monthly “How-it-works” drawing for Attaché, US Air’s in-flight magazine, as long as they want me. The writer Jim Collins and I have been doing it together for over 6 years. We’ve done 75 columns so far, and we’re trying to get the collection published in a book.

I like working for the New York Times, because I think it’s a great paper (with terrific information graphics), and because they generally get me to do lighter illustrations, and it’s relaxing to have that kind of brief after staring at numbers the rest of the week. But I treat these illustrations just the same way I would an information graphic, with the same routine of thinking, writing, sketching, scanning and computer output. You can see this in the Father’s Day sketches and illustration for the Times.

In the last few years I have done seven books with Richard Saul Wurman. The best was a book of medical tests for men (and another for women). Now I want to start projects myself, and I am currently in negotiation with a children’s book publisher to write and illustrate a children’s adventure story. It’s got lots of diagrams and maps in it, so it looks like I’ll never be far from information graphics. But then again, I’m a very late developer, so watch out!

This was the sixth annual contest, which had 48 newspapers entered from Russia, Ukraine, Belorussia and Kazakhstan. The judges handed out 56 awards to 17 newspapers. The winners will be announced on Friday, May 29.

How the contest works

There were four judges from Russia (pictured from left to right): Ivan Anishev, art director from Delovoy Peterburg; Alexandra Konstantinova, art director from Vedomosti; Alexandr Vasin, a gifted editorial illustrator; and Svetlana Maximchenko, editor of “World’s Best-Designed Newspapers™” Akzia and SND’s regional director for Russia. The international judges were Marco Grieco, art director from “World’s Best-Designed Newspapers™” Expresso in Portugal, and myself, Gayle Grin, managing editor of design and graphics at the National Post and immediate past SND president.

The judging process was very thorough. Entries that received three votes from the six judges were given MUCH discussion. That entry then could be eliminated, given an award or elevated to a medal. I appreciated the thinking behind Russian design through these discussions. Oleg Dmiitriev, the interpretor for Grieco and me, was amazing. As we waded through the entries, he informed us of everything we needed to know. He was so good, he even interpreted our body language!

The entries

The larger papers showed some European influence, especially business papers from Moscow and St. Petersburg. Russia’s visual journalists are keen at finding papers from around the world as inspiration, in both design standards and visual techniques; however, there is still a definite respect for local flavor, and these papers seem in touch with their own communities.

Although I could see the growing impact of globalization in their design, the Russians’ vibrancy dominated their pages. The designs ranged from muscular to quietly elegant, very intelligent and linear, with great attention to details and consistency. The instinctive Russian preference for color is refined.

Many small regional papers with few resources entered the competition. They’re still learning visual techniques to tell local stories and are trying hard to implement design standards. It was pleasing to see the strong connection these papers have with their communities.

Russian newspaper history

The history of the newspaper scene in Russia is fascinating. After being suppressed by the Communist regime, there was a huge hunger for information and opinion, which resulted in a newspaper explosion. Free journalism created great enthusiasm but with a lack of a business plan, some of these papers were short-lived. But the hunger for print remained.

Six years ago, Dmitri Surnin (Russia’s first SND regional director) saw the need to help visual journalists in his country. He began a Russian-based workshop and competition. At that time, Surnin was the director of the Russian Independent Print Media program at the New Eurasia Foundation and arranged for a sponsorship. Dmitri is currently the editor of Moy Royan, but the New Eurasia Foundation still sponsors the workshop and competition.

Great hosts

Maximchenko and Surnin are typical of the youth, vibrancy and enthusiasm of the Russian media. They have done so much in promoting high visual standards in this area and were hospitable hosts, escorting the judges through Moscow during the Eurovision traffic jams on Saturday night.

After the judging was complete we went to the 20 Century Fine Art Gallery. The gallery was amazing! I began to understand 20th century Soviet art, from the impressionists to the propaganda art prevalent during Stalin’s tenure. Surnin explained how propaganda was very influential, especially to school children. I also was impressed with how artists from the Leningrad School were influenced by impressionism and cubism in Europe, but yet they interpreted those movements in a very Russian way.

Many thanks to the hosts for inviting me to be a judge and sharing their passion to grow visual journalism in Russia.

Spasibo!

Plenty of attendees were on Twitter, so look for more by searching #sndchicago.

And, the talented Mike Rohde has posted 27 pages of sketchnotes on flickr.

First up: Matt Mansfield, discussing the ongoing Revenue 2.0 experiment. A detailed explanation of the thought process and early conclusions is posted on the project’s site, plus there’s previous coverage from Update.

What are the first steps? Matt says, “Be smart. Be passionate.” Hard to argue with that. In addition to discussing mobile opportunities and homepage design strategies, he shared eight drivers of change to expect in the coming years:

• Digital growth will continue to accelerate, with a permanent increase in fragmentation, choice and competition.
• Most media companies will be portfolios: Traditional, separate and converged.
• We must find and develop valued, differentiated content that engage the audience. Story forms are important as never before.
• Context matters. Provide content when, where and how the audience wants it.
• In this digital world, audience understanding must move to a new level. Old metrics don’t cut it.
• Audience experiences count as much as content. People’s experiences that inhibit or engage them with the content matter as much as content itself.
• Technology shapes everything and must be better understood — don’t miss opportunities because you’re unaware of technical potential.
• Sustainable economic viability is vital.

Next: Jonathon Berlin, graphics editor at the Tribune, introduced his “monomedia” presentation about the print reinvention of the Chicago Tribune in the last year. Jonathon showed how the new tabloid edition has proven Tribune’s ability to reinterpret their strengths in new formats. The Mash is a high-energy approach for the high school audience. Hoy, a redesign launching Monday in Chicago and around the country. He wrapped discussing the Tribune’s renewed commitment to watchdog journalism — from the governor scandal to elevator safety — including an innovative open records help desk designed to help readers dig for documents.

Dan Honigman hosted a social media roundtable with a great group of local online personalities. There was a lot of discussion about building audience and maintaining relationships within the new social ecosystem. Some strategies:

• Pay a lot of attention to SEO. @chitowndaily championed Google Grants, which provide free search advertising that has generates significant traffic.
• Embrace other individuals and outlets — don’t underestimate the importance of simply spreading the word.
• @bradflora said he envisioned local news as a river, and the Windy Citizen was building tributaries off that flow.
• @whet said the Reader gets as much traffic from social networking as they do from links from Huffington Chicago and other local blogs.
• @thelocaltourist said Twitter has connected her with more traditional outlets, such as the NBC Street Team.
• Those not associated with existing publications said you need to be extremely aggressive about self-promotion.

Dan asked for feedback on the Twitter guidelines issued by the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, noting from his experience that “part of the social experience is transparency.”

• @audarshia: “It’s a mistake. Readers want to connect with the people behind these stories.”
• @chitowndaily: “Are you more worried about being sued, or are you more worried about becoming irrelevant. I worry about the latter.”
• @whet: “You can build readership by showing how the sausage is made. The distance between professionals and amateurs is shrinking.”
• @chitowndaily: “What you do on twitter should be consistent with your tone elsewhere. You don’t want people violating basic journalistic principles.”
• @dan360man: “Being a member of the social space is part common sense and part common courtesy.”

Other interesting tidbits:

• @chitowndaily: “The age of aggregation is coming to an end.”
• @bradflora: “I’m in favor of seeing more URLs, covering little niches of Chicago. And I worry about digital sharecropping scenarios,” [where a single site becomes a platform for many voices]. “We need to keep the Web interesting.”
• @chitowndaily: “It’s OK that people go to print for one experience and to the Web for another.”
• @whet: “If you want to monetize, do it in the beginning. Change is what causes readers to push back.”
• @chitowndaily: “Paid content is done. We should stick a fork in it and throw it out the window.”

Adrian Holovaty gave an overview of EveryBlock — which was a progression from ChicagoCrime.org that, coincidently, launched four years ago tomorrow — and recently launched a companion iPhone application.

• “Take every axis from which you can explore information, and make that a Web page.” Whether it’s crimes at a barbershop, at 7 a.m. or of a particular city block.
• “You can’t hire a reporter to stand on every block, it just doesn’t scale. But there’s a lot of news in the long tail.”
• A new feature slated for EveryBlock will allow users to draw their own neighborhood boundaries.
• “Is this journalism? I don’t care and I hope my competitors keep arguing about it while we actually do shit.”
• “I think there a hundreds of startup ideas where you take existing data and just sort it by date.”
• “Embrace hypertext: Anything that can be a link should be a link. Everything should have a permalink. Clean URLs are the sign of a quality Web application.”
• “We’re perfectionists about geographic data. Some stories are about points, other lines or regions or multiple locations.” Being precise helps people at the fringes. For example, a new gas line will affect people across many blocks and just plotting the center point would be inaccurate.
• “Why is it that what we produce as journalists is just a big blob of text? Computers have a hard time parsing facts from unstructured text.”
• Government agencies sometimes get freaked out when EveryBlock asks for data feeds. These institutions are accustomed to reporters asking for snapshots of data, while EveryBlock is asking for an unfiltered and continuous feed.
• Ask yourself: “Will my site work without maps? What is central is the information and the news.” And, if you’re going to use maps, “roll your own” because existing map services are full of way-finding garbage. For more on this, Adrian suggests reading []”Take control of your maps”](http://www.alistapart.com/articles/takecontrolofyourmaps).
• The Knight grant is winding down, and they’re looking at investment and acquisition possibilities.
• Plans for the future include more cities (“I’d love to cover the entire country or the entire world.”) and more data sets.

Jim Coudal wrapped up the day with a conversation about The Deck advertising network, which came about as they looked to market Field Notes and Jewelboxing and found it to be a pain in the ass.

• “In advertising, there’s always three chairs around the table: one for the reader, the publisher and the advertiser. Often, the reader’s chair was in the other room.”
• “We looked backwards to look forwards. We setup a network where there is one ad per page. Think back to the Hallmark Hall of Fame.”
• “Screw algorithms. Someone once said, ‘Oh, you’re just signing up your bookmarks’ for the network. That’s exactly what we’re doing.”
• “We turn down more ads than we take. We’ve been sold out for two years. We only take ads for products that we respect.”
• “It’s very difficult for people to find new solutions to old problems if they’re constantly stuck in the closet with the old problems.”
• “Audiences don’t hate ads, they hate mindless ads.”
• “The dirty secret of online advertising is that we don’t limit inventory.”
• “The most effective mode of communication is a conversation between two people — whether it’s a blog post, a radio spot or an advertisement.”

Bill Adee and Tracy Schmidt wrapped up the day with a preview of Chicago Now, which launches later this summer, designed by Jason Santa Maria. Tracy described it as “Huffington Post meets Facebook for Chicago.” It’s a vehicle for “local, local, local.”

They gathered us together inside a bomb shelter at an abandoned warehouse in Chongqing, China. What was once built as a place of refuge during the Cold-War era, now served as part of an art museum and a place of celebration for this one special night.

The certificates of completion had just been handed out to all the participants of the SND Infographics Design/Asian Boot Camp, when Lily Lu, SND’s regional director to China whispered to the news to me.

The executive director of the sponsoring newspaper, Chongqing Times, had just spoken with China’s government officials to announce that SND had just completed the first-ever professional training for a group of Chinese graphics artists. A group that she said was now officially known as China’s first-generation graphics journalists. The fact that this three-day workshop was even accomplished is monumental, considering that it was announced only five weeks out with a mountain of political obstacles to be negotiated by Lily. It was her tenacity and understanding of her country’s culture and government policies that made the workshop such a success.

A little background

Lily, born and raised in China, had been working at New Jersey’s The Star-Ledger as a designer for 16 years. Early this year, she took a buyout to focus her attention on running SND Chinese. And according to Lily, this workshop was a huge milestone that will give SND the credibility it needs to access Chinese visual journalists and conduct professional activities in China.

Since last year when Lily and I first discussed organizing this workshop, Lily had been laying the groundwork for it, as well as future SND activities in China. Late February, she finally secured a legal and financial sponsor for this event with the Chongqing Times. It left her very little time to drum up participants and confirm speakers. In the end, things fell into place, despite the short notice and a few stressful days. We had about 65 participants in the workshop and two speakers — myself and Hiroyuki Kimura from Tokyo.

Lily says the Times sponsorship of this workshop really set the tone for making SND awareness effective in China, because without its support, the workshop would never have been allowed. The Chongqing Times garnered its first-ever SND award in this year’s competition when it won silver for its coverage of China’s earthquake.

We’re not in Kansas

Lily says that here in China, government officials are very guarded about allowing organizations from foreign countries to conduct workshops or public functions in its country. Especially if it’s the press. And SND was no exception to China’s strict policies. The Chongqing Security Bureau did background researches on SND as well myself and Hiroyuki. But ultimately, it approved this workshop in Chongqing. Lily’s mission is to get SND Chinese registered with the government as an official affiliate of SND in China. But to do so, SND needs to build its credibility. Conducting several of these workshops is how she plans to do this. Once the government feels confident with SND’s reputation, Lily’s mission may be realized. But her first attempt to register SNDC as non-profit professional association was denied by the government.

Back to the workshop

The participants were overwhelmingly receptive to the workshop. At times, Hiroyuki and I felt like rock stars with all the photos the participants took with us. It was quite an amazing experience to see these people hang on your every word. They were extremely attentive during the presentations and at times appeared awe-struck with our lectures.

Hiroyuki, who was a judge in this year’s SND competition, gave a lecture on how the competition is judged. He showed several examples of the winning graphics that had everyone on their feet taking photos of the images on the screen. It looked like a press conference.

To truly understand what this workshop meant to these participants is to realize that this was the first workshop experience for nearly all the participants. Lily says that in China, it’s the bosses that come to workshops, not the practitioners. Participants came from Taiwan, Singapore and the mainland from 28 newspapers, two Web sites (Yahoo.com and Sohu.com) and one college.

Lily says the feedback from the participants was extremely positive. The format and style of the presentations were very effective. And top executives from several newspapers are already discussing the possibility to co-host more SND workshops in Asia.

Of the 36 participants who completed the workshop evaluations, 25 indicated their intention to join SND. The surveys also showed that they would like to have more workshops in graphics as well as page design, illustration, multimedia, newspaper redesign and management training for visuals department. All participants indicated they would like to have professional hands-on training in their respective fields.

The projects

The daily schedule for the workshop was divided into halves. The first half of each day had lectures that ranged from organization and structure within the graphics department to researching and designing graphics. Each lecture was designed to guide the participants through each step of their graphics project. The afternoons were dedicated to the graphics assignment where participants split into groups to research and design a graphic. Some stayed up until 3 a.m. to finish their projects on time, and their efforts paid off. The work was, by far, the best I’ve ever seen in a graphics workshop. In the end, the participants voted on a first, second and third places and two honorable mentions.

Chongqing at a glance

Chongqing, China, is noted for it’s mountainous terrain, beautiful women and extremely spicy foods. In fact, it is said that the people here will not eat food if it isn’t cooked with spicy peppers. During our visit here, we had the chance to test our gastronomical tolerance with both the spices and selection of local delicacies, which included — pig blood, chicken feet, frog, snake, cow intestines, duck neck and tree fungus. Our intestines will never be the same!

Lessons learned

The people of China are among the most generous and hospitable people I have ever encountered. But when you come to mainland China, you abide by their laws and respect their culture. You do things their way. The level of one’s own understanding of this can make the difference between a good experience and a bad one. For this SND board member, the experience was incredible.

Welcome to China … SND!

Jeff Goertzen is the Society’s Infographics Quick Course Director and the graphics editors at the Denver Post.

So I went to Nashville for the SND Web Design Boot Camp at the Freedom Forum, which is an amazing facility on the campus of Vanderbilt University. There were 30 participants at the two-day workshop, most with similar backgrounds and skill levels as me. Luckily for us there were two excellent instructors — Tyson Evans of The New York Times and Dave Wright Jr. of NPR.

Day 1: Getting started and HTML

The two-day course started with a presentation on the history of the internet, at the end of which we learned the three essential principles to being good at code:

• Technology evolves incredibly fast: To become good, you must keep up. To keep up, you must be interested.

• Passion is essential: There are those who learn by hand holding, and those who learn by “view source.”

• Rely on networks: Networks (real people and virtual ones) help keep you sharp and in the know. Don’t be shy to geek out with them.

We finished the afternoon brainstorming a breaking news page and writing basic HTML code and tags in Coda (PC folks used Dreamweaver). We were provided with an HTML coding cheat sheet and shown the basics by Tyson and Dave. All of a sudden, web design wasn’t as hard as I originally expected. HTML coding reminded me of my agate days in high school and college, or similar to CodeFixer in CCI. Although the crossover between web and print isn’t as exact as we print designers would like, the correlations between the two design forms are apparent — tags are like style sheets, there is a grid system, visual hierarchy, typography and more. I left Friday afternoon excited to learn more, wanting to be pushed further

Day 2: Time to get our hands dirty

Saturday started with background on how web design is continually evolving and how we as fledging coders can get started. Tyson and Dave, who were both very knowledgeable of the subject matter and patient with us newbies, talked about seven basic strategies:

• Identify the right projects: Smaller, the better. Start low-risk to guarantee the most autonomy. Success reverberates.

• Reduce. Reuse. Recycle: Look for common interactive storytelling methods. Maybe you can adopt maps, or searchable lists, or user forms into multiple projects.

• Build first. Ask for permission later: Ideas are cheap. Execution matters. Find a project you can do with minimal time and resources, and go rogue. Bring a publish-ready solution to the table and you’ll find that barriers disappear.

• Simple semantics: Create a sandbox at projects.newspaper.com or beta.newspaper.com. Words change expectations.

• Avoid premature optimization: Don’t be distracted by issues of scalability and maintenance. Launch it, see if it’s successful, then sort out the logistics of sustaining/growing.

• Experiment: Responding to change is more valuable than following a plan.

• Collaborate with the right people: (And realize sometimes that means no one).

Now it was time to get our hands dirty. We dove right into CSS coding and, of course, Tyson and Dave had made a CSS cheat sheet, went through all the ins and outs of basic CSS code writing, explained the 960 grid system, and how typography, resolution, widgets and color values work on the web.

After lunch it was time to show off our skills and build a web page with a story, photo, widgets and links on a 12-column grid. After we finished that task, the instructors walked us through the steps of publishing our projects. Mine can be viewed here.

The instructors recommend we read Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman and CSS: The Definitive Guide by Eric Meyer to learn more.

In closing

This session was outstanding and whetted my appetite for web design and coding. Tyson and Dave were as well-prepared as any instructors I have witnessed, the quick course was run seamlessly by Denise Reagan and Stephen Komives, and all the participants bonded together over code. Hopefully there will be a future quick course on the same topic with the same instructors. I cannot recommend enough to everyone how valuable this training session was and that if another one happens, you should register for it.

And, lastly, for the first time ever I just updated the Update home page by myself and written code for a public Web site. Tyson and Dave were right: my inner geek is coming out, and I couldn’t be happier about it.

On Saturday, the Society joined a day-long event in Washington aimed at helping the struggling newspaper industry find online revenue solutions in a few key areas. We believed design thinking could help frame the issue.

We thought that by approaching the question differently we would come up with some new potential solutions. RevenueTwoPointZero pulled together two dozen innovators, editors and designers with a wide variety of experiences in newspapers, web sites and management, and challenged them to consider how user experiences with ads might be different.

The invited participants worked from a collective understanding of all the regular studies and reports that we’ve all read. They also drew on their own experiences and research. We were thrilled to see the invited participants answer the charged with such terrific early results.

In just about eight hours they generated some compelling ideas around four main areas of opportunity:

• Display advertising solutions: Reinventing the homepage
• Classified solutions: Taking back territory
• iPhone solutions: Paying for functionality in news apps
• Small-business solutions: Beyond the click

The links above are for longer pieces that focus on the process that informed the starter prototypes. You can find executive summaries of each team’s work on the main site here.

What’s so special about this stuff?

How was this different from all the other smart workshops and symposiums that have tried to generate a better news experience? We had a laser focus on revenue, since that’s a critical bridge for bolstering our collective journalism future.

Many others have already discussed editorial content in intelligent ways. This group used design thinking to see the challenges in a new way, which pushed toward unique solutions on advertising and other ways to make money.

Design thinking seeks to position the challenge or problem from the perspective of the customer and focus on the experience users have with a product or service. By considering how we can serve up a more meaningful, satisfying experience, and helping users get the kinds of information and services they want — not the ones we think they should want, or the ones we have to give them — fresh ideas are often born.

Design thinking also encourages rapid prototyping — it’s a quick way to take an idea from two dimensions into a third and also show others what the potential solution might be. By collaborating in groups and building out prototypes, sharing progress intermittently, and asking a lot of questions, the groups were able to push each other beyond their initial ideas, and further refine their thinking. That’s what we hope to do with the work you see being released this morning. These are starters. Only that.

What else did we learn? Patrick Cooper, one of the participants, who works at USA Today identified three other realizations from Saturday worth sharing:

1. How to make money to save papers is not someone else’s problem. Nothing’s stopping you from bringing together good people, tossing ambitious goals on the table and sharing what happens.

2. We have to treat advertising as content, and misinterpreting what that means is a ridiculous waste of time. Ethics are ethics, and money shouldn’t affect editorial content. If you can’t assume that, you win the hand-wringing contest and lose in everything else. The industry has to move storytelling techniques, interface design, content tools, and Web fundamentals forward if we’re going to chase business as aggressively and creatively as we chase readership. As one participant pointed out, even with the economy the way it is, there’s plenty of potential money out there that we’re not getting. We have to be more compelling — journalistically compelling — in seeking business. If we had started anywhere else, like a position of worry, we wouldn’t have gotten nearly as far as we did. Labeling an ad as an ad is easy. Coming up with a better ad or system is critical.

3. Futurism isn’t the only way to the future. Patrick mentioned fundamentals in the previous item, and how much they were in practice in the room shouldn’t be overlooked. The participants were equal parts aware, critical and seeking of newspaper workings, digital possibilities and themselves. In blind spots, they listened to understand and built from there. Futurism, like editorial responsibility, was assumed — with much to be done on the way there. Newsrooms have been awful at this kind of practice, sweating the small stuff quickly and productively, and Saturday showed big promise for expectations of leadership. If your newsroom leaders aren’t aware, critical and seeking throughout their roles, they need to change or you need to change them.

Those are all excellent takeaways, even if you don’t like a single prototype we’re showing.

Many thanks to everyone who helped. The full list:

• Deborah Acosta, University of Miami
• Chris Amico, PBS NewsHour Online
• Patrick Cooper, USA Today
• William Couch, USAToday.com
• Chris Courtney, Tribune Interactive
• Steve Dorsey, Detroit Free Press and SND Secretary/Treasurer
• Tyson Evans, New York Times Digital
• Alan Jacobson, Brass Tacks Design
• John Kondis, National Geographic Digital Media
• David Kordalski, Cleveland Plain Dealer
• Chris Krewson, The Philadelphia Inquirer
• Greg Linch, University of Miami
• Wesley Lindamood, USAToday.com
• Vernon Loeb, The Philadelphia Inquirer
• Matt Mansfield, SND President and Medill School of Journalism
• Logan Molen, Bakersfield Californian
• Kristen Novak, USAToday.com
• Carlos Roig, USAToday.com
• Eric Seidman, AARP magazine
• Jay Small, Scripps Interactive Newspapers Group and Small Initiatives, Inc.
• Ernie Smith, Express and ShortFormBlog
• Mary Specht, Gannett
• Kathleen Sullivan, Gannett
• Patrick Thornton, BeatBlogging.org
• Yuri Victor, Gannett
• Kris Viesselman, National Geographic
• Jon Wile, The Washington Post
• Chrys Wu, Washington Post Digital
• Kaitlin Yarnell, National Geographic

What’s next? Others ways to share

We have written about the opportunity we see to explore how advertising becomes content and context when done well. The people we gathered helped see through to some answers. There are many more.

We want to get your reaction and then plan next steps, which could take the form of another prototype day or a conference day where the Society hosts a free public event to talk about the products and the process. We’re open to ideas. You tell us.

Please check the site and help us in the effort. If you have an idea, post it in the comments. And if you have something you would like to write as a longer piece that would help spur thought, email me. On behalf of the Society, thanks again for being part of the solution.

Follow us on Twitter @rev20h

Our group considering options for small and medium businesses started by putting ourselves in business owners’ shoes, imagining:

• A handful of employees, if that many
• Probably only one location, and probably not exactly where we’d like it to be
• Little time to just think or plan strategically
• A total marketing and promotion budget less than $1,000 a month
• Disruptive pressure from “big-box” retailers
• A tendency to spend marketing dollars on the “squeakiest wheels,” meaning sales reps who come calling consistently and insistently — Yellow Pages, maybe radio, maybe the local paper (depending on market size)

Web banner ads probably don’t help small/medium businesses much, especially if the message is poorly crafted, includes no calls to action, or points generically to a “brochureware” Web site.

That annual Yellow Pages ad fills the name/address/phone/category need well enough. What Web advertising should do for small businesses is deliver the message they want to deliver to prospective customers right now, not what they put in the book once a year.

What’s the deal? What’s the special offer, incentive, promotion or value proposition that brings customers in the door this day, this week, this month?

The deal should be the next thing beyond the click for small/medium businesses, and that’s what we created — a way to aggregate, browse, search and promote the best deals from the businesses in a newspaper.com’s community.

A typical newspaper.com — pretty much all of them, honestly — places banner ads in a way that makes them blind spots for Google, Yahoo! and the other search spiders. We don’t treat the advertising messages — the deals — as content. We should. We should put them in databases that are at least as well optimized for search as news articles. Then we should promote the best of them as chosen by users (via printing/redemption of coupons), the most urgent of them by creating limited-time or limited-number coupon offers, and the latest offers placed by advertisers.

We built some wireframes (download the PDF here) that show how these indexes might look and work, how they would connect to advertiser brochure pages, and what we and advertisers could accomplish from them.

So much more to say, and we’ll lay out more details in the coming days, including:

• Evolving services for small/medium businesses to include reputation management – showing business owners what people say about them all over the Web, whether they have a site of their own or not.
• How this works underneath banner ad servers, targeting techniques, even ad networks — because the focus is on services for small businesses beyond the introductory message couched in a banner.
• How it scales up to larger businesses, and to different size newspaper companies.

Stay tuned, check out the PDF examples, and add to this discussion. We need your help to make this practical and profitable.

The small biz team: Patrick Cooper, Chris Krewson, Wesley Lindamood, Carlos Roig, Jay Small, Mary Specht, and Yuri Victor.

Classified advertising — which includes cars, jobs and homes — used to account for 25-50 percent of newspaper revenue. Most of that advertising has migrated from print to national aggregators online, such as CraigsList. If newspapers can recover even a portion of this lost revenue, it could be a game-changer. How’s how we propose to improve classifieds online:

Make it easy to use. In one respect, CraigsList is better than newspaper classifieds because it’s free. But more important, CraigsList is easier to use than any other newspaper classified site and that may be the bigger competitive advantage. Ironically, CraigsList isn’t particularly easy to use, but it’s easier than every other system. That’s why we made our solution easier still.

Make it easy to on the eyes. Classifieds need not look like HTML 1.0. Our solution provides easy-to-use templates so any user can create a beautiful, professional-looking ad. See the description page, below.

Make it free. If newspapers are going to compete with CraigsList, and every other free classified site, they need to meet or exceed every feature of every other site. So basic listings must be free.

Make it make money: There are plenty of ways to monetize free classifieds:

• Sell context-sensitive, behaviorally targeted display ads adjacent to free listings, such as the display ads for Pohanka Honda, below.
• Sell ads on to the category-specific search pages, to get the attention of buyers even before they begin their search. See the category-specific search page, below.
• Provide “premium” listings above the free listings in search results, as Google does now.
• Serve up links to “premium” listings at the bottom of any page that provides the details of a free listing. You can see examples beneath the heading “Check out complete listings” on the description page, below.

The examples described above are primarily for commercial customers. Here are some of the upsells for private-party advertisers:

• More photos
• More keywords
• More prominent appearance and position in search results
• Choice of visual “theme” for your description page
• Block links from competing ads from appearing on your description page
• Allow ad to appear active longer

Make it safe: Craigslists shouts “Let the buyer beware!” — which doesn’t give anyone a warm, fuzzy feeling. While newspapers should leverage their reputation as the most trusted medium, even they cannot vouch for ads posted online via their self-service tools. So newspapers must provide a “reputation engine” where users can post their experiences with sellers, both good and bad, as eBay does now. Providing sellers with a means to manage their reputations online is another source of revenue.

Make it the biggest and best marketplace. How? By aggregating CraigsList and every other local classified site, to provide one-stop shopping for every buyer.

THE USER INTERFACE: Reasons why it’s so important

The key to what we worked on yesterday was the UI. Let me show you four mock-ups of different pages and why we went this route.

I want — I have

If you’re going to a classified site you either want to purchase something or sell something. We wanted to center our user experience around that concept. Here is our classified homepage:

It’s that simple. We don’t want to overwhelm people by overloading the page with frivolous content. We also see no need for ads on this page. If a user hasn’t told us anything, we don’t want to annoy them with ads. Targeted, contextual ads are a value add for consumers. Random ads simply annoy.

If someone doesn’t want to search, they can select a category at the bottom of the page. We only wanted to put the most popular categories on this page. There is no need to overwhelm users with 50 different categories.

Let’s find that car

Our search user interface is built around filters. Do an initial search of say, “Red 2000-2005 Honda Accord Northern Virginia” and this is the result that would show up:

It’s important to have a search engine that yields relevant results for users. Maybe, however, you realized that you also want to filter by price and mileage. We’re not going to make you go back and redo your search. Simply click the price filter, enter a price range and then the site will dynamically find you new search results. No reloading, no going back to previous pages to adjust search criteria. You can then do the same for mileage and the search results would again dynamically adjust.

Notice that ad on the right. It’s contextual and targeted. It’s a local car dealer has red Honda Accords in stock, and they’d like you to check out their inventory. That ad catches your eye because it’s exactly what you’re searching for. You’re not searching for Nexium, Fords or even for car dealerships. You are searching for red Honda Accords.

The listings at the top are premium. One up-sell that we offer is the ability to have higher placement. All the paid, up-sell listings go before the free ones. Also, premium ads get a more dynamic look with a photo and different mouse over effect. We want to offer value for paying customers. We believe with the right tools, we can make people more money on their items they list with us.

Any Ebay users will tell you that the premium features are a must if you want top dollar for your sale. Spend a little bit of money and make a lot more. Those are the kinds of up-sell features we want to have.

Filters and tags. We have filters for all the main criteria for a car: make, model, color, year, etc, etc, etc. We also have tags for all the other features a car might have: sunroof, Infinity head unit, spoiler, XM radio, etc.

Filters delimit a search. They control the results, while tags are a way of highlighting more specific features of a listing. The tags will not delimit a search either. Rather tags that a person selects will appear bold the search results.

People who list a product are free to choose their own tags and make up ones like “rocking sound system.” There is a limit, however, to how many tags/keywords a free listing will have. Later on, I’ll discuss how getting more tags/keywords for a listing will cost extra.

Category pages are like search pages

We didn’t want to break the UI paradigms that we already set up. So instead, we decided to make the category pages just like the filter pages, except none of the filters have been selected yet. Users can simply begin selecting make, model, year, color, etc and see their results dynamically change as they begin filtering results more and more.

The top ads in the middle column are paid classified listings from dealers. This is a good place for dealers to put deals that they want to move. The ad on the right would be more generic than this (we didn’t have time to make a second ad). It would probably be an ad for a local dealership or used-car lot. As the search results were narrowed down, the ad would become contextually more relevant.

Kick-ass free listings

Our free listings had to be leagues better than Craigslist’s and also feel like a paid listing.

Yeah, that’s a free listing. If we are going to fight back against all the online classified options, we will have to be categorically better than them.

One thing I want to point out really quickly is that it’s important to have to that “Find more cars just like this” link on the left. If someone enters this page sideways because they found it on Google or because someone linked them to it or it was shared socially (we’ll be adding these options), they may want to look at similar cars. The “Find more cars just like this” takes users back to the search page with the same exact filter criteria as the listing they are on.

What premium, up-sell features do we have?

• No ads on your listing page — At the bottom of the free listing, you’ll notice three ads. Those are contextually relevant ads by other listing members — paid members to be exact. If people pay for premium listings on our site, not only will their pages not have ads on them, but their listings will show up on the bottom of free listing pages. Win-win.
• More photos — We are limiting the amount of photos that free listings can have. We’ll offer up-sells that allow users to purchase more photos. A micro-payment, if you will.
• Higher placement — All premium listings appear before free listings on search results.
• Bolder search results — Premium listings are bigger and have a photo when they appear on search results. Not only are they at the top, but they visually pop a lot more.
• More keywords — Every listing will be allowed a certain number of tags/keywords that they can use for their listing. Each additional tag/keyword will cost $1. More keywords will make it easier for people to find your product.
• More themes — We wanted to create a really good standard theme, but we’ll also offer different themes for $1-2. These themes will make listings stand out, but we felt that our standard theme had to be really good.
• Longer shelf life — Free listings, much like Craigslist, will have a limited run. We’ll allow, however, premium listings to stay up longer. For certain items, like a car, this is a big feature for users.

Most people approach the free vs. premium features equation backwards. Most people think of what the premium version should look like and what kind of features it should have. Then they think of ways to cripple it to make a free version. In the end, these free versions are just that — crippled.

We thought of it in the reverse. We set up to make a great free version. A free version that would get a person’s item sold. Then we set out to think of ways to make our listings better with premium features. We wanted to figure out how we could offer people even more value. With classifieds, every premium feature should directly translate to a benefit for the user — selling an item for more money, faster, both, etc.

This is what six people accomplished in one day — Chris Amico, Kris Viesselman, Kathleen Sullivan, Ernie Smith, John Kondis and myself, Patrick Thornton. Classifieds can be reinvented.

Homepages get more traffic than any other single page on a news site. Typically, they provide a convenient digest of the newest posts on a site, which is a convenience to users. But this benefit to users creates a problem for advertisers and content providers who depend upon advertising revenue from display advertising.

Here’s why: Depending on the level of SEO, 15 to 35 percent of users enter a news site at the homepage, then exit. This provides relatively few pixels on this single Web page to monetize an entire site. If homepages were redesigned to compel users to view more pages to meet their information needs, then sites would have more opportunities to generate revenue.

Given the time constraints, we offer our homepage ideas as a starting point. We realize our concepts may not be earth-shattering. We would have liked to push farther and offer a wide variety of presentations. And we hope that as the Revenue 2.0 process continues, we’ll be able to do that.

Every proposal offered by every group was about making money. We tried to build an organic, scalable solution with multi-platform potential that joins the needs of the advertiser with a positive user experience and a method for delivering the material we journalists create.

Where we began

The most useful advice I’ve ever been given is “Ignore what people say. Watch what they do.”

While I don’t wholly subscribe to the idea (listening carefully is an important skill), watching what people do has never been easier now that a billion people are online.

A small group of us volunteered to reimagine the homepage and display advertising. While we wanted to apply radical thinking, we put a higher priority on producing something realistic and something that gets users to behave in ways they do every day.

What’s the motivation?

In order to know what to design, we needed to know who we were designing for. Our parameters:

• Design for a midsize market so the ideas expressed could scale up or down. “Aim for the neck,” was one comment.
• Create a format that pleases the advertiser
• Present information that’s useful for the end user
• Do what’s possible to create a seamless multiplatform experience (computer - “living room viewing” - mobile)

We began with a few observations:

• Computer users tend not to scroll on news sites, although some will.
• Users shop online.
• Users come to news sites to get news and information, not to shop.
• Users like things that are free or save them money, are personally relevant, make them more knowledgeable, entertain them, and make them feel special.
• Users do clip or print out coupons. (Free Ben & Jerry’s anyone?) They also use their mobile phones to text. A lot.
• Most IAB-standard ads annoy or are ignored by the user and rarely offer a compelling call to action.
• Television is still the dominant medium in our culture.

With these things in mind, we got to work.

What’s our homepage for?

We know computer users don’t scroll, but many of our pages go on and on despite all the research. We cram content into the limited screen space “above the scroll” and confuse or frustrate readers and advertisers in the process. We also put “less important” information below the scroll where few people look, and that serves no one well.

We wanted our homepage to be a guide that would surface content. In addition, we wanted a format that was scalable, modular and platform agnostic. In considering how to accomplish that, we discussed the use of RSS readers and news aggregators as ways into our content and why people use them. In so many ways, creating a “content index” on our home page mimics the idea behind this, but also reiterates the job of the news organization to create a hierarchy.

Additionally, this approach gives our users a reason to view our home page - that immediate quick view (index/table of contents) of news and an easy ability to move further into content. DrudgeReport.com has found huge success in being an aggregator and creating this format, why don’t we learn from that model…but apply good design to it.

In order to begin visualizing this, we laid out stories in a modular grid format, leaving much flexibility for different options. Not only does this system leave many options available, but, it makes for an easy visual transition from Web to Web-enabled phone, and displays well on TV or large-format display.

We considered not having any ads on the homepage, but metrics tell us a countable portion of loyal users make the homepage their first, and sometimes only, stop. Not having ad content on the homepage would be like leaving money on the table, and frankly, we can’t afford that.

Creating a cue for the multiplatform experience

When it comes to news, more people turn to TV than anywhere else. The Web, like TV, is a visual medium. So why not steal the “lower third” idea for our homepage?

In our comps, this “lower third” functions as a roadblock ad, which remains in the same place, regardless of platform:

• It could be a paid sponsorship, where the goal is to increase mindshare and goodwill. Click and you go directly to the advertiser’s site.
• It could offer a discount code, free sample or coupon that could be printed out or sent to a mobile phone.
• It could offer utility, such as a savings calculator, ticket sales box, or best-price finder. The end user gets customized, useful information; the advertiser gets that user to take action; the news outlet, which may not have had the resources to develop their own utility module, makes money.
• It could pop up a full-screen overlay that displays a microsite, video player or game.
• It could be an opt-in consumer survey, product test or PSA.

Ads aren’t editorial, but they are content

Ah! But what about the notions that content is king, users come to news sites to absorb news, not to shop, and they tend not to scroll?

We put homepage content on a grid that’s set to a fixed depth. We add navigation that pulls content into the grid. All grid units are the same size; news priority is set by combining the number of blocks. We referred to Article Skimmer from The News York Times, but we also looked at other sites, including UXMag, which provided greater inspiration, both for it creative use of the grid and copy that compels you to click.

Rather than large and obtrusive ads on our homepage, we offer targeted, tailored ads within the grid. The boxes are set in rigidly specced companion type and the deals are simply stated. These clearly marked ads are visually subtle and meld better with the content and create a pleasant viewing experience.

Again, our modular approach makes it easy to visually transition back and forth from Web to Web-enabled phone to TV or large-format living room display.

We make advertising part of the content mix in two ways:

Deals of the Day:

On days when there’s no roadblock ad, we offer users “Deals of the Day.” A click takes the user to the advertiser’s offer or website. Readers vote on how good a deal they deem it, which gives the advertiser valuable feedback on user opinion. The listing itself could be tied to a recommendation engine.

The ads are coded with expiration dates, so results return valid ads. Other types of ads could include scarcity offers — for example, a limited time or limited volume reward for taking action. Whatever the Deal of the Day is, it must have a clear benefit to the user.

Permanent and pertinent advertising:

On the homepage content grid in one our comps is a block clearly labeled “Advertiser Index.” It’s a fixed position, so users don’t have to guess where the ads are. They can filter their searches by business name, product, service and ZIP code. The Google-like interface is easy - no new behaviors to learn. People find what they’re looking for, with results tailored to their needs, culled from our pool of paid and free advertisers.

Search results are tied to a recommendation engine, similar to Amazon’s, which shows additional relevant advertising (and if so desired, related editorial content). Once again, search results can display some sort of scarcity offer.

By offering deals of the day, the ads train the user to come back - not just for the news, but for the deal. The ad index search box offers users the opportunity to find additional relevant advertiser information.

Model behavior

Our modest proposal for advertising on the homepage offers a way to address some of the things that frustrate the two audiences on news sites: the advertiser, which wants users to be informed, have a good opinion of them, and take action; and the user, which wants information relevant to them at the time they’re looking or it.

Our design incorporates and adapts the mechanisms that make other moneymaking and high-traffic sites and platforms successful. And we offer a coherent homepage that’s easy, useful and possible.

We hope some of these ideas are ones you’ll consider incorporating. Constructive feedback is always welcome.

Core work group: David Kordalski, Kristen Novak, Chrys Wu
With additional input from Greg Linch, Eric Seidman, Vernon Loeb

Our solutions for monetizing the iPhone are based on existing technology but an emerging audience. The current audience may be small, but it’s clearly growing. Mobile remains new, so it offers opportunities to pursue revenue strategies that may not have worked on previous platforms.

On the internet, information famously wants to be free – that’s why we don’t believe in micro-payments or subscriptions. Mobile users may not be willing to pay for content either, but they are buying iPhone apps that provide features to customize content or deliver new utility. So we propose offering a suite of low-cost features to enhance the experience of content consumption — rather than charging for the content itself.

• The concept: Generating more revenue from mobile applications lies in developing more elastic mobile apps. These would need some form of graceful degradation and enhancement based on free vs. paid.

• How does this look? There’s a “lite” version of each application and a more feature-rich version for payment. If we’ve learned anything about online, it’s that if we don’t charge now, we can never charge in the future.

• The advertising experience: Envision rich ad experiences, perhaps with video interstitials.

• Info-snacking: Rather than try to direct readers we encourage “information snacking” to make it easier and more fun. We would consider building applications with a “half-life” – an app for a specific event or occasion, for example. This would have revenue potential by driving audience and creating new environments for advertising.

How do news organizations get there?

Enable and facilitate impulse buys: A big part of making mobile apps generate revenue surrounds the issue of enabling simpler impulse buys. Facebook sells icons. iTunes is simple and fun. Airlines sell snacks on flights for small fees. A news app could sell event tickets. We would encourage exploration of what works based on audience reaction to the apps. Nothing should be off limits if it could generate new (and not just incremental) revenue. Any new app would need to show how it pays for itself before development begins.

Niche and meta-apps: One key to moving on this plan would be to create standalone apps based on reusable code. We would want to write the main software once and reuse it. This saves development time, creates standards, and allows news organizations to catering to specific audiences (one example would be sports team apps) that can become a gateway to other content and apps.

The proposal:

1. A new kind of banner ad

News organizations should restrict smart phone apps to a very limited, streamlined, clean interface, maximizing minimal space and making the biggest impact. Ads would slide into a bottom-third view, telling a simple story through brief sequences, then prompting interaction to learn more.

2. Free “lite” version of smart phone app

This would serve local news in a traditional macro feed and might also utilize the same basic code to serve micro niches, for example Chicago Tribune News Reader and Chicago Tribune Sports Reader.

The app would include some robust and easy-to-use features in addition to the typical news feed users would expect, including:

• Content that’s geographically tagged. We need to begin building in meta data like coordinates and azimuths now for full future versions that would work with all GPS-enabled phones.
• Links to purchase event tickets would appear with related content, prompting easy one-touch purchases.
• Search advertising content as well as editorial content – it’s all news to users.

3. Expanded-value version of app (pay model) A second version of the smart phone app would have a small fee. Users would pay a one-time access fee for richer functionality – they would not pay for content, just the enhanced features. For separate smaller fees users could buy each of five functions; they could buy access to all five for a group price.

The pay-to-access features would include:

• Off-line reading: The ability to download content that’s normally online-only for use when you don’t have web service. This would allow a user to take content with them on a plane or subway for example. Content might expire after a limited time.
• Enhanced geo-tagging features: Helping users find what’s NEAR ME now would connect them with news and businesses as they move through the world. This would open a slew of new experiences users could have with heightened awareness of the news (weather, traffic, events) and commercial (discounts, sales, timed events) happening around them.
• Archive/export: Users would share permalinks in a simple process (through email or a reading list of some kind) for all the content they browse on their device. It’s a way to link the mobile and desktop experience.
• Customization: Organizing the news the way users want to read it and not so much about setting color prefs and skins (but it’s that too).
• Text-to-speech: What better use for a mobile news device than to combine up-to-date news with audio player functions? Perfect for walking, running, subway, trains, etc. …

If we’ve learned anything about online, it’s that if we don’t charge now, we can never charge in the future. While we don’t believe the iTunes model will work for content, we do believe it will work for features that enhance the experience of using the content.

The mobile team: Chris Courtney, William Couch, Steve Dorsey, Tyson Evans, Kaitlin Yarnall

Along with Steve Dorsey, the Society’s secretary/treasurer, I’ll be part of the team that’s aiming for answers. We’re not foolish enough to believe we can fix things in one day, but we know the path to progress starts with a first step.

The effort, called RevenueTwoPointZero, came about because longtime consultant and provocateur Alan Jacobson began talking to us just after the most-recent awards for The Best of Newspaper Design™ were handed out in February: Alan wondered what designers were doing to think about the business model problem — and he insisted that the solutions have to come from monetizing online through paid advertising.

Alan asked us what the Society’s members might offer to such a discussion, and he wondered whether visual journalists might not be more suited to the task of creating experiences. Those seemed like good questions to us, which is how the effort started, carried along in large part by Alan’s persistence in pledging to convene a group quickly.

We reached out to top thinkers in information design, who all agreed to come, at their own expense, to take on the challenge.

I wrote about the opportunity we see to explore how advertising becomes content and context when done well.

Now we’re working to gather additional opinion and thought leadership on the site before March 21, when we convene in the nation’s capital to start doing hands-on work. The group is intentionally small so we can get work done. A little less conversation, a little more action.

Why should SND members be involved?

As we say in the manifesto that kicked off the project: The Society and its members have been at the cutting edge of virtually every newspaper innovation in the past 30 years including pagination, color, digital imaging and multimedia. SND has more direct leadership experience with radical change than any other group in the newspaper industry. And everyone in the industry agrees that radical change is needed.

That’s why we’re hoping Society members will help us see through to answers by posting comments, offering criticism, providing inspiration, writing guest commentary, and generally jumping into the fray of how online revenue can help fund the journalism so many of us believe is worth doing.

“Our democracy depends upon journalism, which can no longer be sustained by the revenue models we’ve enjoyed for 400 hundred years. The folks responsible for the new revenue models — the guys in charge of online sites — have failed spectacularly to deliver the money newsrooms need to serve the public good,” Alan said, when I asked him to explain his passion for the work. “These guys have had more than a decade to figure this out. Now it’s time for the journalists to step up and do the job the business types should have done — find a way to fund journalism with online.”

That’s what we plan to start doing on March 21. The group will have its first prototypes available by the Monday after the weekend work. We will commit to publishing our first findings report on March 23, if not earlier.

“I’m excited to be joining a group of highly creative thinkers and accomplished communicators. We’ve set some pretty aggressive and reaching goals that some may even view as naive or arrogant, but I think you have to do that in order push yourself,” Steve said. “If we only get halfway to those goals that would be something no one else has been able to do yet. Success for the project might mean just learning something new and opening the door for a better idea set.”

Help with the work ahead

We know this is a giant task, so we are being a bit audacious to say we will have examples to show at the end of just one day, but we like the idea of rapid prototyping to reveal what next steps should be. We also know we have to begin to conceptualize a sustainable journalism future. That’s why we must push the industry to move from conversation to action.

There’s no group better suited to do this than the Society, whose members have always helped answer the call for creativity and innovation.

Please check the site and help us in the effort. If you have an idea, post it in the comments. And if you have something you would like to write as a longer piece for the site, email me. On behalf of the Society, thanks for being part of the solution.

Follow us on Twitter @rev20h

Thanks to P-I graphics and design editor Julie Simon for the front page images

The Hearst Corp., announced today that it will close the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on Tuesday. The March 17 newspaper will be the final edition of the 146-year-old, 118,000-circulation newspaper.

Hearst, which is privately held, owns 15 other daily newspapers, 49 weekly papers and nearly 200 magazines. The company says it lost $14 million on the P-I last year. Since 1983, the paper has been in a Joint Operating Agreement with the Seattle Times, which handles the business operations for both newspapers. The newsrooms operated separately.

Hearst said it will maintain seattlepi.com, making it the nation’s largest daily paper to shift to an entirely digital news product. “Tonight we’ll be putting the paper to bed for the last time,” editor and publisher Roger Oglesby said on Monday. “But the bloodline will live on.”

The Post-Intelligencer won 59 awards from the Society’s annual Best of Newspaper Design™ competition in the last 10 years.

Hearst also owns the San Francisco Chronicle, which lost more than $50 million last year. The company and the Northern California Media Workers Guild reached a tentative agreement March 9 on cuts Hearst says are necessary to the newspaper’s survival. The company says it expects to eliminate 150 of 483 guild-represented positions across the newspaper. The agreement must be ratified by the guild membership in a vote that could come as early as Thursday.

What happens next in Seattle will happen online. The P-I reported last week that a handful of the paper’s 180 employees were made “provisional offers” to stay on, at reduced salary, and produce an online-only version of the paper. Another group is looking for startup money to start a website “to allow P-I reporters to continue serving Seattle as watchdogs and informing the public.”

MORE

» Executive Producer Michelle Nicolosi talks about the new SeattlePI.com [Seattle P-I]

» Memo to the new P-I: Don’t look back [Reflections of a Newsosaur]

» Last Rites [Newsvine CEO Mike Davidson]

» Post Post-Intelligencer [Seattle Weekly]

» Seattle Post–Intelligencer: Turning the Page [KUOW]

» Mike Lewis: Goodbye PI [KPLU]

While at the P-I – those of us who worked there rarely called it the “Post-Intelligencer” – I found my ideas about visual storytelling shaped by people like Robert McClure, Ruth Teichroeb and Andrew Schneider. Not to mention Mike Urban, Dan DeLong and Paul Joseph Brown.

These aren’t graphic artists or page designers. These are reporters and photographers who realize that content comes first. They are solid journalists who think it is a big deal to tell newspaper readers about a big story.

Nine years ago, I coordinated a project that created much of the design the P-I took to its grave. Throughout the redesign, I kept a case study by Roger Black on my desk: “A Newspaper Should Look Like a Newspaper.” Perfect advice for the P-I.

And consultant Kelly Frankeny, the creative force behind the redesign, was quick to inform me that the paper’s typographical look would need to be “muscular.” Exactly.

The P-I went through a lot of changes in its final two decades. It became a place where visual journalists came to do great stuff. It would be easy to recite an honor roll of those who left lasting marks on the paper. The broad-shouldered, workaholic Ben Garrison would head the list. And, personally, I will treasure my dealings with illustrators like Stacy Innerst, Guillermo Munro and Wendy Wahman.

It was almost impossible to replace the lively touch of a page designer like Kurt Schlosser. Or the steady instincts of a photojournalist like Kurt Smith. Or the warm heart of Phil Webber – who was a photographer by trade and, more profoundly, a willing friend to all P-I colleagues, attractive women and sorrowful beagles.

And, of course, there were many others.

The P-I staff relished its uphill fight. It was proud to show what the smaller paper could accomplish in Seattle’s two-newspaper market. But as Hearst continued to make concessions in the Joint Operating Agreement with the competition, the uphill fight started to look like a no-win situation.

So the real heroes of the P-I are not those who honed their talents and moved on. They are the journalists who stayed until the end, determined to remind the city that a newspaper should look like a newspaper.

‘Hello, this is the Universe calling – your message is ready’

We hear about the “restructuring” on Romenesko first. The official e-mails follow; this vice president is retiring (35 years of dedicated service), that one is leaving the company (to pursue new challenges), this magazine will cease publication (award-winning with 900,000 subscribers.) The fallout has started at the top of the company and it’s barreling downhill.

Weeks later we’re informed that there will be layoffs at Fortune but there is a catch, we must wait several more weeks for the Guild buyout period to play out. The tension is unbearable. The office becomes like “Lord of the Flies.” We split into tribes and dredge up weaknesses in our colleagues. We speculate. We make lists. It’s our survival mechanism. It’s awful.

To make myself feel better I have a rationale: “I won’t get laid off because graphics editors are specialists… They’re happy with me…It’s not like the editors can do what I do…Chances are it won’t be me.”

I also have unrelenting anxiety: “It’s all about the bottom line… They’re not protecting the journalism… Maybe I should try to find a stable job where I can ride out the recession.”

So I recalibrate. I make a spreadsheet of household expenses, bring lunch to work every day, sock every extra dollar into savings. I calculate how long I can get by without a paycheck and obsess over what to keep, what to live without. My husband and I talk endlessly about the implications of the layoffs. So much so that our 6-year-old Isabel notices, “Work/jobs, work/jobs, you’re always talking about work/jobs.”

I think, “If only I can keep my job, everything will be fine.”

I think, “If only everything stays the same, I will be fine.”

Of course nothing stays the same. My moment comes with an e-mail from the managing editor, the subject line: “Come see me at 10 a.m., please.” The rationale flies away, anxiety does a victory dance. Months before the layoffs were announced I started worrying about the direction Time, Inc., was heading, and by extension, myself. I couldn’t sit still, so I set up lunches for down the road with former colleagues, and with folks that I admired and wanted to meet. I also made lots of phone calls to lots of people to talk about the state of the industry. I wanted to hear their views and solidify my own. I began to rebuild my portfolio. I didn’t think I’d need it, of course, but it was a good way to take stock.

The night I was laid off my cleaning lady Lillia called to thank me; she had gotten three new gigs because I had recommended her to friends. The next day Vickey Mouze, who had attended my seminar at SND Las Vegas, got in touch out of the blue. She was starting her new job and my talk had given her the inspiration to take the next step! My head felt scrambled. What kind of twisted karma was this?

I found out the next week — one of my industry friends called about a potential job. The next day a design firm called after finding me through a friend. Then those lunches I had scheduled started to happen. Maybe I was going to land on my feet? Potentially, but it was by no means tidy. I was in complete shock, losing track of entire conversations. I felt exuberant in the morning and overwhelmed by bedtime. I alternated between not sleeping and sleeping like a dog. I had this raw feeling that there was a message for me out in the universe and if I sat very still I would hear it.

My first day of unemployment I was sitting on the top of a stoop in SoHo talking on my cell phone when a young woman walked by with her coat open, draped over her shoulders. It was freezing outside. From my vantage point I watched her as she sat on the curb between two parked cars. She took off her right clog, removed a pack of cigarettes from her coat and unwrapped the cellophane — with her foot. Next, she pulled her cell from her pocket, opened it, checked it, closed it. Took out a cigarette, the lighter. Lit the cigarette, smoked it — with her foot. Put the clog back on and walked away. She had no arms. No one else on the street had seen her.

When I came home I found out that my friend Kris, her son, Bennett, and her significant other, John, had gone down in a small plane crash. The engine had failed during landing at 900 feet. They had all survived. My message from the universe had arrived. My recalibration hadn’t been deep enough. What was it I was worrying that I couldn’t live with out? In the scheme of things, what had I lost?

We all have these rationalizations that we string into stories to frame our decisions. When I left The New York Times to join Fortune my rationale included “Magazines are more stable than newspapers. Readers come to linger on long form, not for breaking news.” So my story went, I would jump ship and learn how to make magazines, carry-on the great tradition of Fortune graphics and buy myself 5 extra years, maybe 10.

This was a nice story. It helped me understand the arc of my life, but it also served as an excuse to avoid an overwhelming situation. I was convinced that my personal narrative encompassed the extent of my abilities. What it really encompassed was the extent of my rationales. What happens after the worst happens? Everything shifts, you grow in ways you never expected, and then you figure it out.

RESOURCES

Download Sarah’s presentation from the recent SND meetup in New York City here.

Become a member of SND to receive Design magazine by mail.

We’ve enjoyed the competition with the P-I tremendously over the years, wincing on the rare occasions when they “beat” us with a stronger front-page design and savoring it when we came back with an even better front page for The Seattle Times. Our daily competition made both newspapers strong visually, and we’re going to miss trying to guess what their talented photographers, artists and designers would come up with in covering the biggest stories in Seattle.

Denise Clifton, Director of Visuals and News Projects, Seattle Times
Barry Fitzsimmons, Director of Photography, Seattle Times