As I mentioned a few times earlier this year, I was incredibly excited to see my buddy Andrew Lee redesign the Japan Times. At the most recent PechaKucha Night in Tokyo (Vol. 147, held on my birthday no less) he did a presentation on how the whole redesign came about, and it’s now available online. It’s a great watch.
I posted last week about the redesign of The Japan Times, and today (April 1) saw the publication of the first regular issue sporting the new look. A big otsukare to Andrew and his team on the fresh new design.
This week marked the 120th anniversary of The Japan Times, and the big news to come out of this celebration has been a complete redesign of the print edition of the newspaper, taking effect on April 1 (but they released a preview edition this week). The most amazing part of this news is that it’s my good friend Andrew Lee who is behind the redesign — oh, and he just happens to be the person who designed our Arcade Mania book. Andrew wrote three essays about the redesign, first about the redesign as a whole, then about the new logo (pictured above), and then looking through the various logos the paper has had through the years.
I’m really happy to see the paper get a new look like this — following the nice web redesign it got a few years ago (also created by a friend, Benjamin Thomas of Bento Graphics). I’m also quite proud to have been a Japan Times columnist for a decade — with my “On: Design” column, that ran monthly from 2005 to 2015 — and to have been part of the JT’s 120 years.
Matsudo Paper looks like a beautifully produced project to promote the city of Matsudo. There’s more to see in this post on Canvas.
Bonnier’s Mag+ — a concept for a magazine on tablet — was all the rage when it came out earlier this year, and now Bonnier follows that up with another new concept, News+, this time presenting what a daily newspaper could look like on iPad. Again, some really interesting ideas here, and I’m wondering how closely the upcoming Daily digital newspaper from Apple and Rupert Murdoch will come to looking like this. (via Cédric Riveau)
Remember the problems Esquire encountered this month in releasing its latest issue on iPad? Looks like as long as your content involves topless women that you can spin around 360 degrees, then Apple is A-OK with it — as seen in the amazing new feature included in The Sun‘s iPad app. (via Grids)
Why does the New York Times iPad app still do the thing you see pictured above, which is having an article that is supposed to be pretty much just a slideshow that shows up in another section, but with no slideshow or link to it. It always annoyed me with the Editor’s Choice version of the app, and there’s no reason that this should still happen, since I’ve seen articles in various sections that include a link to a proper slideshow.
If I keep bringing up errors in the NYT app it’s because I actually really enjoy the content, and it’s part of my daily routine to read the news on it, and I just want it to be a better app and not do stupid things anymore.
After my post the other day about the new NYT app, someone suggested I check out the one for The Times of London, since there’s a 30-day free trial — The Times app has been a very well known early proponent of not offering its content in app form (or web form) for free.
The first thing I encountered on the very first page was confusion caused by a non-linked item. It’s the page pictured above, and if you touch any of the news items you will go directly to the full article inside the issue, but for some reason that great big photo of Keith Richards, and even the headline below, doesn’t lead to anything. Yes, there is plenty of Richards-related content inside, but why not link to it? I spent some time trying to touch, double touch, and swipe away, as I couldn’t believe it was just a static item.
It’s nothing important, but I did like the way the large Times logo on the front page transitions into a smaller version as you swipe the page (I tried to capture the animation, and you can sort of see it in the image above, as it gets smaller). It’s just a nice little touch.
I did have a problem with the tight justified columns though — as you can see below, it makes for very ugly lines of text. I know we’re used to seeing this in a proper newspaper, but it doesn’t really work when you view it on a screen surface.
The biggest difference between The Times app and what the NYT app does is in terms of the way you work your way through the issue. While the NYT app simply adds new articles in each section, and they are then presented in summary form in a grid that usually includes between 5-9 pieces, here you not only download that day’s paper, you also have to swipe through every page, every section one after the other.
Sure, you can jump to different sections by accessing an index (pictured below), but since you are often just limited to a header and photo, it’s hard to tell if you really want to dig in. I do like scanning through a lot of news articles, and so the NYT format suits me best — there’s no way I’d want to have to flip through every article of the NYT. The fact that pretty much every single article in The Times leads with a large half-page (or more) photo does make it less painful, but still.
The other thing is that, with all the fuss that surrounded the launch of the app and the promise that it’s specifically formatted for iPad, I was expecting less of a template design and more creativity in layouts. But no, the vast majority of an issue follows the same look (you’ve seen pretty much all available layouts in the images included in this post). The only exception I found was for a feature at the end of the issue I downloaded that covered “Autumn Walks.” Pictured below, it does look rather nice, and I wish they would do more layouts like this.
Also part of the feature, they had great descriptions of routes to follow, and it’s only by flipping to landscape mode that you could see a beautiful photo from that walk (as seen below).
But in the end, if I don’t stick with The Times it’s not because of what I mentioned above or even the subscription price, but rather that it’s just too UK-centric for me in terms of its coverage.