Comments on: Three new online magazines

Three new online magazines

stbalbach — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 10:15:04 -0800

Three new online magazines - Triple Canopy, Issue Magazine and Rosa B - tackle the problem of text presentation on the screen in innovative ways. via

By: Mister_A

Mister_A — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 10:24:31 -0800

I think Issue receives a FAIL. I like the Triple Canopy interface though.

By: Wolfdog

Wolfdog — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 10:35:28 -0800

Yes, and Triple Canopy has a sensible url scheme for linking in to content. It could use page numbers, though.

By: Sys Rq

Sys Rq — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 10:39:27 -0800

~~tackle~~ exhibit the problem of text presentation on the screen in innovative ways FTFY. Link 1: Unscalable text. Fail. Link 2: Yellow on white; way too busy; can't scroll down to finish any of the columns. Fail. Link 3: Text obscured by overlapping graphic elements. Fail.

By: Guy_Inamonkeysuit

Guy_Inamonkeysuit — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 10:41:40 -0800

The sites all have good points and bad points, design-wise. I think I liked Rosa-B the least; I thought the use of the Z-index on Issue was clever; and Tripple has an interesting interface but IMHO the text is too light for the white background. All of these sites suffer from one glaring problem: they are meant to be read on a computer, by someone sitting in front of the computer. The only way I've ever found any enjoyment in reading on a digital device is when I used to download stuff to my RocketBook, which was the size of a paperback novel and could be carried around anywhere, even to the bathroom, even at night -- by acting as its own flashlight. Once such devices become available at <$75 (preferably less) each, electronic publishing will begin to take off. Until then, not so much.

By: Outlawyr

Outlawyr — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 10:51:59 -0800

These are so so, bad, and horrible, in that order.

By: youarenothere

youarenothere — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 10:54:05 -0800

Triple Canopy is nice except for the unscalability; the keyboard shortcuts especially are a considerate touch. But that Rosa B interface is all. Kinds. Of. Fucked. Up. Who wants to feel anixety about whether their mouse pointer might drift two pixels off of a text box? (unless, of course, it's fun and whimsical!)

By: soundofsuburbia

soundofsuburbia — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 10:56:12 -0800

REM E M BER TH E NINE TIES? magazines like R A Y G U N was all the rage

" | Led by founding 

a | rt director David Carson,
 
R | ay Gun explored
 
e | xperimental magazine
 
t | ypographic design.
 
T | he result was a chaotic,

a | bstract style, not always 

r | eadable, but distinctive in appearance."

wiki

This reminds me ofR A Y G U N, pretty slick and fun and all and probably ~~good~~okay

predecessors to a

shiny, happyTOMORROW, BUT ALL IN ALL I'd rather read, oh, I don't know?

THE WIRE

for the ^{TIME BE I N G}

By: jsavimbi

jsavimbi — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 10:59:49 -0800

I wouldn't say they went out and tackled anything. More like some yet-to-be mainstreamers decided to, once again, play fast and loose with readability, accessibility, technology et al. I give Triple Canopy an A+ for whitespace, an F for hidden navigation and a booger mark for name picking. Issue is DOA and Rosa B reminds me to uninstall Dreamweaver if it's still installed anywhwere. Before getting too cute with the web, ask yourself this question: would you bring your business plan to a bank in three-dimensional, pop-up book format?

By: soundofsuburbia

soundofsuburbia — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 10:59:59 -0800

I really should've proofread that.

By: Artifice_Eternity

Artifice_Eternity — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 11:00:41 -0800

tackle the problem of text presentation on the screen in innovative ways. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

By: ardgedee

ardgedee — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 11:02:44 -0800

> Link 1: Unscalable text. Fail. The text in CanopyCanopyCanopy scales for me. I've got this pinched nerve in my back that twitches painfully every time somebody says they have a solution to the scrolling text problem. I'm unclear on why it's a problem for anybody besides designers obsessed with pixel-perfect control over the user experience. Said designers never seem to learn how unsatisfied users are when designers have successfully exerted pixel-perfect control over the user experience. Perhaps if there was no internet they would be at work on the problem of how woodlike wood is. Setting that rant aside, CanopyCanopyCanopy is interesting and the content is well-presented albeit overbaked. The other two sites are too twitchy for me to feel comfortable reading, and I did not get far in them.

By: parmanparman

parmanparman — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 11:05:00 -0800

Rosa B: good use of color, bad layout, annoying boxes, bad text colour. Issue: Failure, abject. Triple Canopy: Smart. Mootools? Anyway, I think it's got a few kinks: hard to go back, page on page navigation forces one to forget about the back button, which is impossible.

By: Sys Rq

Sys Rq — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 11:07:52 -0800

The text in CanopyCanopyCanopy scales for me. You can scale it, but making the text a legible size causes the page to become illegible: It just cuts off at the bottom.

By: sfts2

sfts2 — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 11:09:27 -0800

I like the Tripple Canopy's penchant for allowing me to click and be presented with an almost completely blank page. Of course, by the word 'like' I mean 'think sucks giant balls.' The others are worse.

By: notsnot

notsnot — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 11:13:36 -0800

Whose leg are they trying to fucking pull, here?

By: gemmy

gemmy — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 11:19:01 -0800

Tripple Canopy was OK, albeit with text weirdly cramped below center on my 15-inch work monitor. On Rosa B it was too easy to mess up what you were reading by moving the mouse, and the color choices were awful. Issue was a total failure - I have no idea what the heck they were thinking. In all, interesting post that made me really appreciate the plain text format of MeFi and countless other sites that get usability at least decently right.

By: heeeraldo

heeeraldo — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 11:21:26 -0800

soundofsuburbia: I really should've proofread that. I'm working my way through some Heller books at the moment; you could probably spin typos as "an earnest attempt to redefine the perfectionism inherent in design by introducing glaring flaws to distract from the subtle ones." or possibly "de-academicization and redemocratization of design by removing all gloss, from paper to content and anywhere in between."

By: psmealey

psmealey — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 11:22:05 -0800

I think that Triple Canopy's paging could work if you are presenting multiple pages of images to a viewer. Certainly much better than how Flickr does it. Would be nice to tabbed index, though, or some other visual cue to know where you are in the series. As for reading text, not sure, I am not sold on it.

By: heeeraldo

heeeraldo — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 11:24:22 -0800

addendum: lest I get accused of pulling a nasreddin, I'm referring to Steven Heller.

By: batmonkey

batmonkey — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 11:31:52 -0800

Not yet.

By: quadog

quadog — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 11:34:22 -0800

Everything old is new again. Reminds me of the Legibility Wars of the Emigré area. There's some interesting interface things going on with these. If you don't like it then you don't have to read it. Just like you probably never picked up an issue of Raygun.

By: cortex

cortex — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 11:37:36 -0800

I felt bad about the typo in the post, so I removed the extra "p" from "Triple", but now I feel bad about the apparent unexplained rash of misspellings in the comments here, so I felt like I should point out that that happened.

By: justkevin

justkevin — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 11:54:59 -0800

What browser was Issue designed for? I can't read it in either Firefox or IE. Is that intentional?

By: dosterm

dosterm — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 12:16:44 -0800

Yep. Design is easier if you ignore function.

By: Aversion Therapy

Aversion Therapy — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 12:17:48 -0800

innovative adjective 1. ahead of the times; "the advanced teaching methods"; "had advanced views on the subject"; "a forward-looking corporation"; "is British industry innovative enough?" Triple Canopy was alright, but seemed somewhat limiting to me. The whole flashcard-esque interface just felt too much like a Hypercard stack to me... Issue was was awful, at least in Firefox. Maybe it looks brilliant in IE or something, but I couldn't scroll down to see the bottoms of the columns, the rollover was awkward and pointless, and the whole thing was just a big jumbled mess. Rosa B was an interesting idea, but I found the it incredibly distracting and kind of irritating to have to roll over and back to go from text to menus. No, I'm sorry. Not "ahead of the times" or advanced, just different, and not necessarily good.

By: SPrintF

SPrintF — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 12:37:18 -0800

Perhaps I've been spending too much time on my game console, but I perceive the big + on the Triple Canopy page as a single control for up-down-left-right. Which might actually have been better.

By: roll truck roll

roll truck roll — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 13:07:18 -0800

I like Triple Canopy. I'm sympathetic to what rosa B is trying to do design-wise, but... sheesh.

By: seanmpuckett

seanmpuckett — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 13:11:14 -0800

Why can't I have plain black text on a nice creamy white background in a font with decent kerning that wraps down the screen in an eye friendly 50-70 em width column, so I can just tap the space bar to keep reading all the way to the bottom? And I could enlarge the font with the browser controls that I'm already using. Oh, wait, because the 20-something web design architects need to prove that they're forward-looking and thoughtful individuals and want to show you their shiny new tool instead of the old one that's still around from their grandpappy's patternmaking kit. Well, kids, here's a big fat fucking clue: the old tool one is still around because it still fucking works. Go back to design school and polish up your CV's pretentious artist statement because as far as I'm concerned: you're fired. Canopy: You're destroying my eye-trail. Fuck off. Issue: Too much visual noise; can't scroll with wheel. Fuck off. Rosa: Flyovers are worse than bad advertising. Fuck off.

By: UnknownQ

UnknownQ — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 13:24:12 -0800

I run an online literary "situation", and I present simple black on white PDFs. While it seems like I may want you to print them out, I have no delusions that this is what actually happens. I merely like the aesthetic of PDF on the screen. And simplicity.

By: roll truck roll

roll truck roll — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 14:38:01 -0800

Good stuff, UnknownQ. I run a similarly minimal literary venture.

By: nowonmai

nowonmai — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 14:58:36 -0800

I remember downloading magazines in Docmaker format, before PDF really took off. That's what that first one reminded me of. But only being able to read short sections before having to click a big "+" button is too annoying for the nostalgia to save it. The second one, issue magazine sucks. What am I supposed to do, view the source to see the stuff that does beyond the bottom of the page? If you had more than three words per line maybe the columns wouldn't be too long for your stupid scroll-disabled design. If the designers of that Rosa site want to email me, I can point them to a basic primer on the CSS box model. I think until they work that out, they should use html tables for layout because this is broken.

By: fcummins

fcummins — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 15:54:40 -0800

Wow, I had no idea people cared so much! What fun. As someone who is absolutely shite at this kind of thing, its nice to know there are wars being fought.

By: ~

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 16:41:03 -0800

I like triple canopy. It's amazingly regressive. If it's solving the question of how to adapt text to the screen, the answer it comes up with is to present a slide-show of a book. Not exactly groundbreaking, but the quick transitions, nice layout, easy keyboard navigation and text scaling work great. Pleasure to read despite being a stupid answer to the difficult design question alluded to in the FPP. (Yep, you heard me. The text scales great. Either my copy of Safari has superpowers, or y'all are a bunch'a dorks.)

By: sonic meat machine

sonic meat machine — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 17:00:11 -0800

God. Damn. Just put some text on the screen in a readable color scheme and "design" through content. Most pages that put a premium on "design" absolutely fail to be worthwhile, and most of the really popular sites on the internet are more functional than anything else. Look at Google. Slashdot. Hell, Metafilter is gray on blue; we're not exactly breaking the designer budget here. Function over form.

By: camcgee

camcgee — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 21:40:39 -0800

I clicked on a Triple Canopy article in a browser window that was more than 940px wide and I had no idea how to turn the page because the "+" link was off to the right side, beyond view. I'd call that a pretty substantial failure of UI.

By: abulafa

abulafa — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 21:43:47 -0800

Point of order regarding Slashdot and their fuckheaded three-column design -- it scales terribly. A few Ctrl-+es and your right column full of nothing you care about is now in charge of your experience and will never ever go away. Can't even scroll it off the screen. Others here have said it better, but let me nth the stop-"solving"-problems-that-aren't. Text, for the most part, isn't "design content", it's "content" and design needs to enable it, frame it, and let it do some talking. If these layouts were clothing we'd all be wearing accent scarves for socks and screaming logo-emblazoned handbags for pants which we'd end up soiling since zippers are too *expected*. Half the reason I read mefi is the layout flows anywhere. In fact, I sort of resent the YouTube additions (I know I can disable them, I'm hoping to change my mind) because they do some evil design things like take over my window rather than pop-up inline like everything on the web should.

By: breath

breath — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 00:46:23 -0800

You're supposed to click the articles in Issue. Then they expand and get a scrollbar and are actually readable. It was incredibly non-intuitive to do this though, as indicated by the number of comments here bitching about the narrow columns and inability to scroll.