Coming up peaches

This morning my feed from the New Yorker's Book Bench blog popped up an article about the new Paris Review website.

Frankly, it's the Paris Review takes a less lighthearted approach to reading than I usually follow. But the site is really very attractive



The New Yorker describes it, rather endearingly, as having a 'clean, Frenchy feeling' and notes the use of a lithograph of Paris in the footer which draws a connection back to early print editions). Apparently the site will change out it's key colour with very season and edition of the journal, which I think is a lovely touch.

There was something soothingly familiar about the site, and casting about I realised it reminded me of another of my favourites: Thinking for a Living. Peach has never looked so good.

The case against Flash

In her article Why can't the world's best architects build better websites Alissa Walker picks up on one of my pet peeves about 'creative' websites (this goes for you too, certain major art institutions)

Architects are the original interactive designers. They're skilled at creating navigable structures. They specialize in designing rich experiences for their users. But if architects designed their buildings the way they designed their Web sites, they'd all fall apart.

...

Most architects' sites rely on an animated technology like Flash. While this is perfectly appropriate for some interactive experiences, is not what you want to be using if your site is--like most architecture firms' sites--a long list of projects that you want to be easily searchable. Flash sites often rely on gimmicky navigation using images and rollovers instead of simple, clickable text. And in general, a Flash-based site can't generate a URL for each separate page. So say you do end up finding the project you were looking for--you're not able to index or email it. This is when you find yourself saying things like, "Click on projects, then roll over the little museum icon, then click Michigan, then click on the floating image in the white square..." Can you imagine giving the same kind of directions inside, say, a building?

It's a great piece. Go read it.

Searching

Earlier this year, I (re)read Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. Stephenson piqued my interest in the early history of the Royal Society, and I followed up with Richard Holmes' hugely enjoyable Age of Wonder, James Gleick's biography of Newton, and am currently a couple of chapters into Lisa Jardine's Ingenious Pursuits - like Holmes' book, a history of mid-17th to mid-18th century science and invention told through the stories of the people who made them.

There's a romance to the period that I find irresistible: the way that the natural world seemed to unfold its mysteries at this time, the way literature and art and science and politics all intertwined, and the colourful characters who took personal and social risks to chase their dreams.

So when I saw yesterday in the Guardian that the Royal Society has released 'Trailblazing', an online library of its papers, to celebrate its 350th anniversary, I was stoked. Then I hit the site.

The (Flash) interface is designed as an interactive timeline - you pull it along, and hovering over little grey and red dots brings up pop-ups that contain a heading and a picture. Clicking 'More' gives you a small narrative about an article from the Royal Society's Transactions, and some links - one of which will take you to a PDF of the actual article, on another site.



The Guardian article notes:

There is the letter from the chemist Robert Boyle, asking the physician Richard Lower about the consequences of transfusing blood from one animal into another. Does a dog lose its quirks after transfusion and gain those of the donor? Does blood from a big dog make a small dog grow? Can you safely replace a frog's blood with blood from a calf, and might that change one species into another? The answers were no, no, no and no.

But how do I find it? Trailblazing doesn't have a search box. And if I did happen to find something I wanted to share, through clicking somewhat random red dots, there's no way of linking to it.

I understand the urge to build something 'interactive', although I'd argue that 'interactive' nowadays means being able to personalise a site to your tastes, or add your own information, not click and drag. And I understand the urge to give a browsable interface to what can be quite impenetrable texts. But I don't think Trailblazing makes as good a use of the awesome content as they could. Why not (a) use the people who made the science as your entrance points, rather than dates (b) make the deep content searchable along with the new narratives and (c) combine the two sites into one?

Little big web

Little is big on the web, from mechanical turks to microcredit.

Now a Brooklyn start-up is doing micro-patronage of the arts. Kickstarter describes itself as "a funding platform for artists, designers, filmmakers, musicians, journalists, inventors, explorers". Artists submit their projects to Kickstarter, who load them to the site, where people can then chose to support a favoured project by donating a couple of bucks.


Crucially, donors don't just get warm fuzzies in return for their donations: the artists offer insider access to the project, and sometimes physical or tangible exchanges. In return for a $50 donation, audio engineer Earl Scioneaux III offered a gumbo dinner and a chance to listen to his recordings with other financiers; Emily Grenader got both the funding and the participants for her project of mailing out a postcard every day for a year.

The site is run by Perry Chen and Yancey Strickler, who raised $30,000 in seed finance before launching the service. In this New York Times article Chen emphasises that Kickstarter is not "an investment, lending or a charity [but] something else in the middle: a sustainable marketplace where people exchange goods for services or some other benefit and receive some value." Fittingly, the article appears in the NYT's Business section rather than being filed under Arts.

At the moment the site is curated; Strickler and Chen review and select the projects. According to the NYT article, they're considering opening the site up to anyone and charging a small fee for transactions. I wonder if that will be as successful - curation is so often the key to quality and appeal.

Of course, sometimes big is good too. Check out Chris Heathcote's loca london.* The page (yup, you read that right - a 5100px wide page, not a site) grew out of his @localondon feed on Twitter, which sends out reminders of when art exhibitions open and close. In this blog post Heathcote tells how this feed of alerts and reminders has turned into a page giving an overview of current exhibitions, plus reviews of the shows. Heathcote clearly sees the curatorial aspect of the page as important: it's not *everything* that's on, and nor is it regurgitated gallery press releases. Instead it's quality, easy to skim critical responses to shows. From the post:

these two services are trying to be slightly different – super simple, low volume, presented in a neutral voice and delicately curated. It reflects what I want to go and see, not everything that’s on.

Interestingly, Heathcote notes that the one-pager is partly inspired by a part of the Guardian that's only available in the print edition: the G2 grid of culture reviews.

Heathcote also describes why he went for one big page, not a 'normal' site. If you ask me, it's inspired - a really clever, thoughtful, elegant tool that re-uses information intelligently and subtly.

*Thanks to @gnat for the tip-off

Big ups

I've been meaning to write about the Christchurch Art Gallery's website redesign for months now. With a graphic overhaul, an information architecture tweak, and the release of a properly searchable collections online (underpinned by Vernon), the Gallery has, I think, put itself streets ahead of other municipal galleries, which appear dark, cramped, and unnavigable in contrast.

For a reminder of what the CAG site used to look like, here's a February 2008 shot from the Internet Archive's way back machine (which I recommend: you'll discover things like; the GBAG has not changed its homepage layout since November 2002 (when records begin) - here's November 2004).

Between Feb 2008 and today there's been at least one refresh of the homepage, as I recall, and now this whole new treatment. Taking a lesson from MoMA and Apple, CAG have gone for the hero image treatment, banking that the major temporary exhibitions are the main reasons people are visiting the site. Inside, navigation has been shifted over the right-hand side, and the font size mercifully increased - pages are big, bright, and white.

A few little moans:

When I click on Exhibitions in the top-level nav on the homepage, then on Publications inside the second-level nav, I'm suddenly shunted off into a second-level page in the Shop section. I *know* people use their back buttons, but breadcrumbs could still be a useful orienting device here.

I'd love the News and Events section to have RSS feeds, so the information is pushed to me (I'm lazy, and I'm not local - this is the best way to get it to me).

I'm not convinced by the right-hand placement of the nav, and I'm not convinced that the designer is convinced either, when I see how the nav is being repeated in the body copy in the Education section. I wonder if the pale grey meets web standards guidelines for contrast, and I'd really like it if the navigation changed visually to reflect where I am in the site. Actually - I just double-checked that statement, and the background of the top-level nav does change ever so slightly to a more tomatoey shade of scarlet - I'd still consider using tabs at this level, and something else at the second and third.

What I am convinced by though is the improvement to the Collection search (no more browsing by artist name!) and the number of digitised publications that are available online (with sensible linking through to Christchurch City Libraries) . Like Auckland Art Gallery, Christchurch has really got its act together here.

The collection search, the publications, and dates of shows are the three reasons I visit the CAG site. I guess you could say my motivation is primarily 'research', not 'visit'. The site does a good job of delivering up content for schools, but not so much for the adult researcher; the content is all there (history, publications, exhibition archive, collection search) but the Library in particular is hard to find.

All up though - a please to use, a surprisingly deep reservoir of content, and a big improvement. Belated congrats to all responsible.