Design makes a difference

Posted on January 23, 2007 by Melissa Worden

I found this project, Feeding Africa, by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. I’m not sure when it was published (we really need to put publish dates on these things!)

What a clean, visually stimulating design. It really makes this project work for me.

And it probably helps make the section “stickier” for readers. Interesting to look at, they’ll keep digging to see more content.

This kind of project may take longer to produce, but I think the pay off in better journalism — and page views — is worth it.

One disappointment I found here is that the graphics are still quite basic. But I won’t be too critical of that because I know why this happens — it’s so darn hard to coordinate with print.

I don’t know the dynamics and relationships at this paper, but if it’s the same as in many, the Web had to wait for the print designers to generate the graphics first for print. And THEN they were altered for multimedia. What you get is a print graphic that’s “jazzed up” to look interactive.

Given those kind of restraints, I think what they did to the graphics is a nice solution.

And it’s this very type of design that inspires me to keep pushing myself in my own work.