When you know a little something about newspaper page layout, you notice things like this and snicker. The
Washington Post published a photograph of a Facebook page and centered it quite obnoxiously in the text. Frankly, the white space and lack of color looks horrible. If I wanted to look at a website, I'd be on
WashingtonPost.com anyway. The page came out this way because the page editor demanded a graphic for the story to take up space and so that the page wouldn't look boring. I'd argue that the photo makes the page even
more boring.
Although I have to admit that I do love what screenshots reveal about people (or media organizations). For instance, the
Post still uses IE as its browser. (A little behind the times?) Even more revealing, the "photographer" of this lovely piece of art seemed to have come across the page through a google search. Again, what is this photograph telling us that we readers couldn't just google ourselves?
Massive um, trying to be cool?
ReplyDeleteI mean, if using IE is "behind the times," then I guess a majority of internet users are behind the times, since more people use IE (39%) than Firefox (25%), Chrome (21%), or Safari (a whopping 8%). IE works fine, so there's really no reason to download a whole new browser.
ReplyDelete-An IE user :)
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Summary_table
(Now that we know how Wikipedia works, I'm not ashamed to cite them!)
As a very amateur designer myself I always have to keep in mind that 98% of people don't pick apart these things the same way we do. This one is pretty glaringly bad though, especially with the Internet Explorer thing.
ReplyDelete