November Carnival of Journalism: What would the Obama campaign do?

Pretty much every single industry that involves convincing consumers that your product, or idea, or business is a great idea has been strafed with a raft of “What [Your Industry Here] Can Learn From Barack Obama” blog posts lately, and journalism is no exception.

This month’s Carnival of Journalism, which I’m late for due to an incredibly busy everything right now, asks the question.

I’m going to cede my space to ruminate on that one to Sean Blanda’s excellent post on how to design like Barack Obama:

“Originally created for GQ by Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones, the Gotham font was meant to be masculine and fresh, which aren’t bad adjectives for a political campaign.  If you are interested, the makers of Helvetica interviewed the creators about their thought process when setting the typeface.  But what regular designers can learn from Obama is not only his font selection, but the discipline to create a design and stick to it, much like good politicians stay on message.”

Read the whole thing…

Redesign

I’ve been quietly working up a redesign for this blog at random moments a few minutes at a time. I was due to make a change — the last iteration lasted more than eight months.

You’ll find the usual bells and whistles and links down low, past a few recent posts.

Differences and details:

  • Bluer. Cleaner. Typographical. Light on images.
  • An emphasis on words, not “content.”
  • “In Other News” is now served by my Google Reader linkblog.
  • “Elsewhere” is delicious.
  • Inspiration included Daring Fireball, and the iA theme Zac Echola has been using, plus the theme Daniel Sato switched to not too long ago.
  • Also crucial: Compose to a vertical rhythm.
  • Built in WordPress 2.3+ on top of Sandbox 1.0, with the markup adjusted in quite a few places to serve my needs and cater to my obsessions regarding lists and divs.

I made a conscious effort to make this look a little more like a blog and a little less like a news site. And it was fun. You’ll find more posts on the homepage, which makes me happier about posting more often. We’ll see how that works out.

There are, as usual, a few unfinished bits, such as the navigation that points to about and work pages. I’ll get to that.

Is the type too small? Is anything out of place in IE6? Why are you using IE6? Stop doing that, right now.