Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Image wrap box Free blurb with Takeaway Last fall, on a flight back from China, Evan Spiegel decided to remake Snapchat. Inspired by apps he’d seen in that country, Mr. Spiegel wanted to create a new version separating users’ friends’ content from the professional media. Each category would be sorted by an algorithm rather than…
“Hang on, I just have to put my soles on,” I call after the kids, who are racing out the door for a trip to the market. The soles in question are two dove-gray, rubber flaps that snap to the bottoms of my slippers, which I have just imported from London. A slipper-transformer that will…
Netflix has unveiled a new custom typeface to be used across the streaming platform’s brand identity, developed by the in-house design team in partnership with foundry Dalton Maag. According to Netflix brand design lead Noah Nathan, the move away from Gotham and to creating a bespoke font was driven by escalating costs and the ability…
Photo: Getty Images Designer Robert W. Blakeley isn’t a household name, but every American has seen his work. No, he wasn’t employed by Coca-Cola or Ford or Disney, but instead worked for the US government. Blakeley’s most famous design? He came up with the yellow and black fallout shelter sign. Sadly, he died last week…
The “notch” on the new iPhone X is not just strange, interesting, or even odd — it is bad. It is bad design, and as a result, bad for the user experience. The justification for the notch (the new Face ID tech, which lets you unlock the device just by looking at it) could have…
Abstract This article problematizes the relationship between clicks and audience interests. Clicking patterns are often seen as evidence that news users are mostly interested in junk news, leading to concerns about the state of journalism and the implications for society. Asking and observing how 56 users actually browse news and what clicking and not clicking…
When I quit my editing job at Wired in 2012 to spend more time with my startup, Contextly was focussed on helping readers dive deeply into a story, via smart related links at the end of stories. I was frustrated then at the state of digital publishing tools and the lack of innovation in the news media…
There is something endlessly frustrating when a news site launches a redesign that is a barely changed rehash of a large media companies older design. Few, if any, media companies are backing up their design with user experience science. If the final sites are any indication, we have paid little attention to decades of significant…
Kill the article. That was the theme of the Global Editors Network hackathon that I participated in with Seattle Times teammates Ben Turner and Justin Mayo. This was one of 20 hackathons happening worldwide, with winners of each event going to Barcelona to compete against each other. Unfortunately, we didn’t win. But we still think…
Why have I been blocked? This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. The action you just performed triggered the security solution. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data. How the Web Became Unreadable.