I’m guessing you saw this post from Romanesko about the Chicago Tribune’s 90-day redesign?

ASBPE Chicago commented on it here.

Martha Spizziri
(Web editor and Boston chapter vice president, American Society of Business Publication Editors

We did design differently. We got rid of the graphic designer, deleted every icon and image, made a functional site that worked in Mosiac — then used images and ads as our color.

But clearly there was design and information architecture.

That was a much better way to put it.

::drool::

As one who’s been in both the butchery and brain surgery business, you’re exactly right. Although I’d submit that you didn’t remove design from the online process, you just designed differently. As Steve Jobs once said, design is “not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

When I finally got control of the online department, we did usability studies, designed for browser speed and functionality and left out every bell and whistle.

The results: a 4-fold growth in traffic and a 3-fold growth in revenue in less than two years.

If we did in print what we did online — I believe it would have EPIC FAIL. We removed design from the process online; at Wired, design was integral (not so much anymore) to the brand and the stories.

The mediums are different. They do different things. They are consumer differently.

The rules for one don’t apply to the other in the same way the skills of a butcher don’t qualify you for brain surgery. (I will not reveal whether online is butchers or brain surgeons

1) Many designers can’t write or summarize or create headlines or skyboxes. This is a critical skill that j-schools seem to look over. I was lucky enough to be a designer, copy editor and writer at a smaller publication, and I felt I did well wearing all the hats. Don’t think all of my coworkers felt the same, unfortunately. But larger pubs have very segmented staff, and they hire strict designers for strict designing.

2) Redesigns have for the most part failed. This is a whole nuther blog for me, but I agree it’s more like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic than it is “reimagining journalism.”

And here’s where my comment ends, because wenalway had proven himself to be a troll by name-calling. Will not feed the troll from now on.

Also, I’ve yet to see most designers trained on how to handle different types of content. They can’t summarize or write skyboxes, and these are two critical skills as newspapers accelerate.

And I find it amusing when designers claim people who don’t agree with them just don’t get it. Their redesign efforts have failed across the board to attract readers, so I’d say they are the ones who don’t get it. Just check the scoreboard. The facts all go against them; all they have is their pathetic concoct-and-chant strategy.

Oh, and Wenalway’s a well-known troll among designers. I advise not feeding him.

http://www.tabpi.org/designchallenge.htm

Paul J. Heney
President, TABPI (www.tabpi.org)
Part President, ASBPE (www.asbpe.org)