Content versus design, the most epic battle of all time
And content wins every time, for a stupidly obvious reason – without content, there is no design. The inverse is not true. Battle over. Checkmate. Do not get involved in a land war with Asia, and content is Asia in this case.
But the war, they say, is not over. To extend this dead metaphor even further, what content and design need is an alliance against the overwhelming forces of reader apathy and bad market research.
I like to be clear about this: I do not blame my generation for the hemorrhaging status of print journalism. I blame a pathological fear to change both content and design to fit the current young reader. They are being ignored by the elders who make decisions and refuse to alter their ideas of what “good” journalism means. I bet what they consider to be pure is inconsequential to you – you just want something different.
Most say content drives design, but design and content must both drive readership. If you do some online research, you’ll turn up some studies that assert design’s negligible impact on reader interest. These studies normally take readership counts before and after a paper has been redesigned, and often find that readers appreciate the changes, but aren’t really swayed to buy the product. This shouldn’t be all that of a surprise – would you, the standard young reader, care if a newspaper switched up some of its serif typefaces and played with its grid? I doubt it.
That’s the problem, newspaper aren’t going far enough. They don’t want to take that plunge. In visual communication, among the most important things a product or business needs is an identity. Too many papers these days have no identity to speak of. The New York Times does (Hey! We’re grey!), USA Today does (Which photo goes with this story? Who knows!), The Wall Street Journal does (How much type can we get on one page? Quick answer – boatloads.), but these papers are still suffering, though to a lesser degree that most metros are and other large papers have no easy mental image to conjure up. They have no identity.
All American papers need to do is look at foreign papers. The most successful ones look like magazines, and contain smart commentary and seek to answer the question of why, and not what. The Internet can take care of happens, let the print content delve into the issues at play. And to support this content, a paper needs to shed all traditional ideas about design and go bold, bold, bold. Modern packaging and book design is trendy, creative and evocative. American newspapers are not. They’re grey, wimpy and stodgy. Put a full page photo on the front of every issue, don’t be afraid of large bodies of type if it’s backed up with a dominant image, smart usage of color and good use of white space. Young readers will get through long stories if they’re presented well.
So design does drive content in some ways. Design must invite the reader, and today’s readers are swamped with so much information, that something smart and bold needs to grab them by the throat to get their attention. Content cannot achieve this. It can keep people coming back, but it cannot grab someone. Design must accomplish that, and decision makers must recognize this.
Posted by Kevin Alexander
What I tend to wonder about is as the media pushes design further and news content is replaced with news commentary where will that take journalism? It is completely true that in the future the newspapers that survive and possibly thrive will be the ones that fully integrate into the internet and other means of mass media, however, will money driving the changes what will happen when we realize that we are no longer reading the news but what someone else thinks about the news?