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Rescue from Antarctica

theguardian.com

8 pointscantlin14 comments

We've done much more impressive bespoke layouts than this in the past, but this one was made 100% with native CMS entities. AMA.

Interesting, and kudos on the Guardian redesign if you were involved - the article pages are my favourite bit of the redesign. I would love to see this sort of bespoke treatment on the home page, which is still a bit incoherent and unfocussed. It'd be great to see a home page takeover for really important stories which gave space to one particularly important story or shot for a day, in the same way that paper newspapers sometimes used to allow the takeover of their first page for important events.

Can you go into a bit more detail for us about what the back-end which supports this is like, what sort of entities you use in your CMS (above just basic pages), what sort of techniques you use to separate out styles which are only used on one page/section etc? Are you just working on some stories for the Guardian team, or working full-time on Guardian stuff?

  > Can you go into a bit more detail for us about what the back-end which supports
  > this is like, what sort of entities you use in your CMS

The Content API [1] is the heart of the beast - it takes input from our various content systems, including those involved in the production of the paper, and makes it available to frontends in a simple shared format. The CMS responsible for this piece treats content as an ordered list of entities of various types (text, video, quote, etc.). The article leverages a new (to us) pattern called layout hinting. Each entity is given a semantic value, like "narrative" or "auxilliary" which describes its relation to overall story. The rendered templates are then free to play with those however they choose.

  > what sort of techniques you use to separate out styles which are only used on
  > one page/section etc?

I couldn't answer that one confidently, but you can always go and have a look at the source [2].

  > Are you just working on some stories for the Guardian team, or working full-time
  > on Guardian stuff?

I'm the product guy for content pages on the site [3].

[1] http://guardian.github.io/content-api-docs/index.html

[2] https://github.com/guardian/frontend

[3] http://gu.com/humans.txt

Really interesting, and thanks for the github links, I'll have a look - I had no idea this stuff was open source.

Do you know if the Guardian has done any split testing with webfont vs non-webfont articles? I wonder if it would make a noticeable difference to any interesting metrics.

I can't say for certain, but I don't think that's something we've split tested in isolation. We've found with typography testing that you need to commit to fairly long running tests to see anything statistically significant.

Can you share any of the results from your typography testing?

Surely you're aware that moving graphics are regarded as distracting to those who visit for the words? And that a way to easily disable animations is still the accepted etiquette?

A good point, though not something we've heard repeated in UX sessions so far. For me the cinemagraphs ease the journey through the three thousand word piece, and help me orient myself in the text.

> A good point, though not something we've heard repeated in UX sessions so far.

That's because people don't read any more, they look at pictures. The NBC website (http://nbcnews.com/) knows this -- they recently abandoned their traditional print-oriented layout in favor of one that consists of captioned pictures, and the bigger the picture, the better.

> For me the cinemagraphs ease the journey through the three thousand word piece ...

The same purpose can be served using either still images or images that can be made to stop moving. Otherwise the article repeats the annoying behavior of modern online advertising, which is animated specifically to draw the visitor's attention away from legitimate content.

I emphasize my comment may not matter in the long now -- people are simply going to stop reading, and articles like the one under discussion will disappear entirely, replaced by captioned moving pictures.

Quote: “But he couldn’t: there was too much ice closing in, like a big vice [sic].”

I'm seeing much more of this class of error as the years go by, as people give up on reading, then become overreliant on how words sound to choose the right one.

A vice is a character flaw.

A vise is something that exerts a mechanical grip.

Actually, the difference seems specific to US English. My OED includes vise only as an alternative to vice, which carries both meanings. A quick Google also turns up this [1] article, which claims (without citation) that "In the U.S., the word for the clamping tool comprising two jaws closed and opened by a screw or lever is spelled vise. Outside American English, the vise spelling rarely appears. The gripping tool is instead spelled vice."

[1] http://grammarist.com/spelling/vice-vise/

Okay, that's interesting. It seems that having two distinct words was an example of pointless complexity for the modern reader, and compressing them into one simplifies things for everyone. This reminds me of the fate of "literally", which has come to mean (a) literally, and (b) figuratively. Overall, a great simplification.

http://www.salon.com/2013/08/22/according_to_the_dictionary_...

I would never have considered an English (in a geographic sense) journal of any kind to use the spelling vise in this context.

Regards the other point if anything I would have said that was one of the worst "evolutions" of our language in recent times.

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