My DE colleagues and clients alike know that I love the New York Times website. It sets the standard for journalism on the web, and continues to push for better ways to use design to share information with the public.
This afternoon’s panel with Tom Bodkin, the NYT’s design director and assistant managing editor, and Khoi Vinh, design director of the website, was a must-see, therefore.
Bodkin and Vinh don’t quite see eye-to-eye. Bodkin’s clearly more invested in print; I liked his insistence that the print medium has attributes that can endure even as information moves online — that we shouldn’t always try to make print versions more like the web.
Vinh defined the design mission:
- Deliver news in as readable and usable a form as possible
- Deliver news with maximum elegance and minimum ornamentation
And then he described some principles central to the Times’ design philosophy that I think are especially of value:
- the need for high quality journalism is greater than ever
- the future news landscape will have thousands of micropublishers and a few global news platforms (this is a pretty huge one)
- traditional approaches to journalism have to be reconsidered
- the content on NYTimes.com needs to be “platform agnostic” — it must be able to go wherever readers want to read it: browser, iPhone, printout, RSS reader, etc.
Web and print, Vinh said, will never be in synch again. The objective is “to be true to the medium and the context.”
Awesome.
