Tuesday, March 08, 2005

Two ideas for design

I'm not a design person. I'm not even particularly visual.
But I know what I like in design.
Two new items (I'm not sure what to call them...design systems? design concepts?) have emerged in the past few days. And they have captured my attention, if not my heart.
First, is the EmPRINT project from my alma mater, the journalism school at the University of Missouri-Columbia. I'm afraid I tend to agree with Adrian Holovaty, who dismisses the project as a "glorified PDF file." Nonetheless, I'm trying to keep an open mind and have signed up to participate in the field test.
Second is the print version of the April issue of The Atlantic Monthly, which is using a sort of Web-era, footnotes-like, text-can-be-like-hypertext format in its cover story. The writer is David Foster Wallace, the author whose work is most likely to be described as "sprawling." So footnotes of some sort are to be expected.
I'm not as excited by this as my fellow B2B blogger David Shaw. I find Wallace pompous and exhausting -- and my first reaction to the layout of Atlantic article is annoyance. But it's worth a look. If you don't have a subscription, visit this discussion about the future of books and click on the graphic for a peek.

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