ED EX DESIGNER
C
n.p. ed-ex-de-sign-er
“
“
Individuals who can combine the holistic, systems-level thinking of UX with the incisive storytelling instincts of editorial design
Khoi Vonh co-founder and CEO of Lascaux Co
Contents
Whilst researching the editorial design industry, I stumbled upon a new term; ‘Ed Ex designer’ - an editorial designer which specialises in designing functional editorial apps. Whilst investigating Ed Ex designers, it became apparent that not much research has been explored into the process of editorial app design, and how much it differs from print design. With the birth of the iPad in 2010, it became possible to publish editorial content on apps. However, with the first batch of editorial apps getting slammed by UX critics, we question if designing these editorial apps is the correct job for the established print designer? Or is their a new demand for a skill set of UX design crossed with editorial design within the industry? I set out to investigate my future world in editorial.
Part I: What is ED EX Design
We discuss how editorial design involves UX design, who needs Ed Ex designers, and what are ‘poor editorial apps’?
Part II: Design processes
Looking at how Newspapers design their apps, what designers they use and how they test it - The Guardian app - The Sunday Times app
Part III: The future of editorial design and Education Evaluation
Ed Ex Design
PART I
Editorial design, more specifically the process of designing for print, has been around since 59 BC. From early Newspapers using the Gutenberg press to modern day magazines printing 6000 colour pages per hour. However over the last 5 years there has been a change, a development with digital content that now allows readers to view their content online, iPad, tablets and on their phones.
digital tools. What most publications have discovered along this trial and error period, is the importance of interface design (UX). The design of many editorial apps on their first release have frustrated customers, and have made editorial apps develop a terrible name, due to not enough researching or appropriate user testing before launching.
Since the birth of the iPad in mid 2010, printed publication sales have dropped, forcing many publishers to put out an editorial app to not loose readers converting to their new
An example of a much anticipated app that flopped was the launch of Wired. In an article published by founder of Information Architects Oliver Reichenstein, ‘Wired on iPad:
InDesign iMac 24’’ screen
just like a paper tiger..’ He describes the app as “the paper magazine (that) was crammed into the little iPad frame. In the form of a PNG slide show”. He explains that there was no thought about the medium change, what will and will not work. Reichenstein uses this app as the perfect example to prove why columns, along with other common editorial print grids, do not work on an iPad by stating that “they fragment the text body, cluttering and suffocating the notoriously small iPad screen”. Reichenstein also compares the lack of thought over typographic use on an iPad, quoting that ‘it’s not appropriate to just export designs from Indesign into an iPad’. So if InDesign is not the tool to use for designing these editorial apps, then what is? Will editorial designers learn the importance of UX design? Also what qualifies a poorly designed editorial app?
iPad screen
After reading a lot of poor editorial apps reviews on iTunes, and other critique blogs, I decided to start off by finding out what a ‘poorly designed editorial app’ is.
Comparision of a design on an iMac screen, and on an iPad screen. Source: Information Architects
“
“
At half of the size and half of the resolution of a printed page, you’re playing a different game Oliver Reichenstein Founder of Information Architects
I conducted a survey to editorial app users, to find out the users opinions on apps, and which apps have they vote have the poorest usability. 13.3% voted for the Design Observer app to have the poorest usability, navigation, pixelation and interaction. National Geographic and The Guardian came out on top, with plenty of interactive graphs and facts popping out at you as you flick through National Geographic’s carefully designed magazine specifically for iPad.
The Guardian won points for navigation and its on and offline capability. I found that the apps that viewers voted as the poorest, wasn’t because of their content, but how the content was presented to the reader. This is where an ED EX designer role comes in. I decided to try and get in touch with the National Geographic and The Guardians’ design teams to talk about their design processes, roles, and design backgrounds within the team.
Design Process:
PART II THE GUARDIAN
Andy Brockie is the Senior designer for the Guardian, working extensively on the redesign of
the website, the Guardian iPhone and Eyewitness apps, and he is one of the lead designers of the Guardian iPad edition. In an article published by himself, he describes the design process from start to finish. The first stage with designing the app, was to take the elements from the Guardian printed version. Brockie describes the first design as that “It uses the same language as the paper to indicate a sense of scale and hierarchy to stories at the top and most basic levels”. After they experimented with this layout, the design team realised the next step “was to get rid of everything that was too graphically complex” for the screen as too many elements that may have worked in print, were clashing with the small iPad screen. They had many problems choosing the correct grid, until “Mark Porter (Creative Director) drew what is now referred to as the famous grid: in
essence exposing the grid that we had been working to, and making use of it as a device to assign importance and hierarchy to the stories. Put simply, the more importance attached to a story the bigger the block it would occupy. From that point on, we knew we had something that we could develop and add to, so we began to fill in the details. We created a grid that would work in either orientation and put colour and character on the bones” describes Brockie. “I worked closely with Barry Ainslie, our Art director for Sport, to define a range of typeface styles that suited our headlines from print. We defined the minimum required and slowly built them out as the app developed. It’s the first time we’ve used our (extensive) range of fonts to such effect in any of our digital products. In parallel to the look of the app we were constantly working through various navigation methods. To help us get and share an understanding of this model, myself and Jack Schulze from Berg spent some time creating animatics (simplified paper mock-ups shot using a camera and tripod and then animated together in sequence). These helped us quickly get a sense of how a reader could navigate this app. These animatics were
The grid Mark Porter designed, which assigns important and hierachy to the stories.
Andy Brockie and Barry Ainslie test out a new font for Guardian app, different from that in print. Here they are testing the font on the grid to check the heirachy.
also useful to pass over to the development team as a starting point.” “We have created something that is a new proposition, different to other digital offerings. It works in either orientation and nothing is sacrificed. Instead of it being based on lists, breaking news, and the fastest updates it’s instead designed to be a more reflective, discoverable experience. This gives it the potential to have a design capable of responding to the news... just like a newspaper.” The Guardian still relies on users to pass feedback to the design team on how they can im-
prove the app. Their design process for the Guardian app is still on going, featuring a lot of user testing and involving a range of designers from different backgrounds (print/digital/app/ creative/motion) to design the final model. I think the app is incredibly clean and uses effective navigation in a simplistic way to not confuse its wide age group of users, whilst maintaining the feel of a newspaper by using a swiping motion to turn pages in the same direction.
Here The Guardian design team uses “viewers�, which are the same size as iPad screen to view how their news stories will
Design Process:
PART II
SUNDAY TIMES
A
fter researching The Guardian’s design process, I decided to compare another newspaper app so see how similar their design process was. One Wednesday morning, I sat down and chatted to Gordon Beckett, Art Director of the Sunday Times. It seems they have a very similar approach to designing their app. “The content is the same as what goes in the printed issue”, Beckett mentions as the cost of creating new content is much too high. He believes the news page should always be the home page, then sport, business etc comes after. This is same format, and almost layout, as that of their printed newspaper. The way one navigates through a printed newspaper, has the same importance to that of an iPad, therefor the way you flip across page right to left remains the same on screen. At every phase in their design process, the Sunday Times design team would take their app to a focus group for user testing. However Beckett sometimes questions the truth within research, and relies more on more on his design team for answers. He believes that when they take the app to be user tested, it is almost perfect then. “No lawyer ever asks a question he doesn’t know the answer to” he states in comparison. Beckett and his team have been using a program called Content Station by Woodwing, however they have developed their own system for the coded part of what they do, which has been up and running since last week. “What I have tried to do, the philosophy for this newspaper, is if I can get as many people to do as many things within the design team, that gives us a stronger and more versatile platform.” After spending half a day in The Sunday Times design department, watching 30 designers get to work, it seems that their roles are very shared between different digital platforms, just as Beckett said. They have a shared folder, which they take jobs (pages) and asign them to themselves, then upload, then get checked off. These jobs could be for print, web or app. A slightly different approach from that of a design studio, where roles are more defined. The Sunday times launched a new update to their app as of last week, however the reviews have not been that great. Receiving a 1/5 stars on iTunes, the app has been labeled as ‘a step
backwards’. It seems as Beckett was right about not trusting his user testing group, and that you never tell if they are there ‘“just for the sandwiches”. I believe The Sunday Times app is too similar to that of their printed version, they need to slim down on content and hierarchy, similar to what The Guardian focus on. Perhaps Beckett’s’ philosophy on using many designers to cross platform isn’t the correct formular to designing an editorial app; “All my designers I would expect to be interested in more than one thing, working in more than one discipline, whether it be newsprint to app”. Perhaps UX design should would be a skill set included in editorial design education to help this problem in the future?
The Sunday Times lastest app
The Future
PART III
EDUCATION AND JOBS
The term specifically ‘User Experience’ came in to existence in early 90’s with the proliferation of
computers at work places. It is now a fully developed role within the design application world, working between users and the application, comonly known as UXD or UED. So how involved are editorial designers with UX design? Has a new breed of Ed Ex designers been born since the launch of the iPad? Khoi Vinh, ex creative director of NY times online, states “I would guess that there are less than a few dozen people in the world who can create superb software for editorial products, who can combine the holistic, systems-level thinking of UX with the incisive storytelling instincts of editorial design. I’m not even talking about a designer who can ‘do both,’ who can create a great digital publication one day and then create a great print publication another day. There are almost assuredly even fewer of those in the world, if any.” Now this is quite a bold statement, and when put to Gordon Beckett, Art director of the Sunday Times, he says he completely disagrees. “My view is that if you can design, you can design anything. All you have to do is understand the problem.” But surely the problem here is that editorial designers are not up to speed with UX design? Which leads to trail and error. After hearing these 2 complete contrast answers, I was intrigued to find out what skills and experience I would need to get into the editorial design industry. When searching for ‘Ed-Ex designer’ as a job title, my results have varied. Jobs titles have become blurred within what I would call a trial and error time between editorial and UX design. Many jobs whilst searching for Editorial Print designers mentioned “must have iPad design experience”, or “general online design expe-
rience is also necessary including banners, e-mails, landing pages and social sites, plus a knowledge of wireframes, IA and general UX rules” - Job application from Design Week. Gordon Beckett believes that “Years ago there would have been very distinct devision roles between what was a creative role, what was an editorial role and what was a production role, and I think those barriers are probably over half way down now. I think the next stage of editorial evolution is to be more aware of what other disciplines are, what colleagues do that we didn’t necessarily have to understand in the past, but for the good of the product and making the future a more viable place then I think we all have to broaden our horizons a little bit.” So are we adapting what happens in the work place into our design education? When researching Graphic Design Degrees last year, my main criteria was that I wanted to do a Graphic Design degree that featured designing for a range of digital mediums, not just print. Surprisingly I had a hard time finding course descriptions that featured “app design” within the program. However at the Art Centre College of Art and Design in California, they were the first school to create a class called “Editorial for iPad” within their graphic design department in 2011, just one year after the launch of the iPad. The class was such a success that it “attracted the attention of two education specialists from Apple, one who visited the class and another, according to Barr, who said there was no other class he knew of focusing on editorial for the iPad. The class encourages the students to
create a magazine app for the iPad, and create the content. The challenge however, that the students faced was that “We didn’t have an application for building apps, so we used Keynote, InDesign, Illustrator and After Effects. Developers have certain tools to put their apps on an iPad, but for people like us, working on the concepts and designs, there aren’t really any tools specifically for the iPad. We need something that functions like Fireworks for the Web, except for the iPad. If Apple could make an application like that, this class is going to get awesome.” That article was published in May, 2011, and since then Adobe have added certain app features on InDesign CS5 and CS6 specifically for the iPad, as well as many other online apps you can use for front end iPad design, instead of coding. One of my favourite print magazines, Huck, also features their magazine for free on issuu.com, an online magazine platform website which allows you to embed your magazine on your website. However Huck’s design layout stays exactly the same online as when it was designed for print. I decided to question the designer about this, as surely viewers don’t read articles in the same way online as they were intended to for print. Esra Gokgoz, Huck and Little White Lies Digital Content Strategist, mentions “The magazine is designed for print, so issuu.com is not necessarily a way for people to consume the content in it’s fullest sense. It’s not really comparable to the experience of sitting back on your couch with a printed copy and a cup of tea, so we never expect it to be consumed in the same way. For us, it creates a different way for people to encounter and discover the magazine and gives them a taste of the beautiful typography and layout - so they can hopefully decide they want to get their hands on the print edition.” I also asked her if they would ever decide to put out an app for Huck, perhaps their customer base is more of a print loving audience, and they are not scared to loose them over technology. “Little White Lies (a film review magazine) already has an app which pairs their reviews with geolocation and a full database of showing times - so that users can read the review, and find out when and where the film is showing, all from within the same app. Again, the context is completely different when you are accessing our content on your mobile phone. You’re probably on the move, you might not want to read a 3000 word article off your relatively small screen. This was the rationale behind how we put together the Little White Lies app. There are currently no plans for a Huck app - but we have just launched a responsive website which allows Huck content to be accessed across all devices. We definitely have no intention of trying to squeeze all the
goodness of the print magazine directly onto a smartphone - it simply won’t work. We never see ourselves as going digital just for the sake of and always consider the context of use or consumption as we venture onto new platforms.� This interview has in a way, restored a little bit of hope for me, as a passionate print magazine lover, that perhaps my editorial design career wont have to be purely around UX design, however those skills will defiantly help.
Huck Magazine as seen on issuu.com
“
“
We definitely have no intention of trying to squeeze all the goodness of the print magazine directly onto a smartphone - it simply won’t work
Esra Gokgoz Digital Content Strategist - The Church Of London (Huck and Little White Lies magazines)
Evaluation
The term ‘Ed Ex’ may not be a widely used term currently, however after
researching and talking to editorial designers, it has become apparent that although the term may not be used as a job title, editorial designers are already combining the knowledge of both storytelling skills, as well as user experience design, within their established editorial design roles. I hope to see more editorial app design in future graphic design education courses, but also widely acknowledged as a separate skill set within the work place. It seems as though a lot of employers want the most out of their employers, and the simple outcome for designing an app would be to get a print design employee to take on this role. However through my research, I have discovered that this formular, that may be money saving - although might not be the best method. I do believe that using the whole team of designers to input ideas will over all create a better design, however I also believe that UX design is different to print design, and we must teach the best methods of designing navigation within Editorial Design. So perhaps young designers, who have been bought up with digital design rapidly changing, will therefor have a better understanding to get their head around designing for both problems, rather than using the established print designer who has to solve a completely new problem. The future lies within the young editorial designers to learn both skills fluently.
Design, Research and Interviews by
Sophie Allen