How newspapers approach the digital scenario? A photo gallery of online newspapers. The full gallery is available on Flickr at:

Keep reading for more screenshots.

Searching for the terms "Information Architecture" on the New York Times the first two occurrences, related to Information Architecture as the science of organizing and structuring informations on a (digital) media, date to August 3, 1997 (Designing Action) and to August 30, 1999 (E-Commerce Report; On-line merchants find that a well-designed Web site can have a big impact on the bottom line).

From Design Action:

My AdSense account is experiencing problems and I can't access my reports or any other page of the AdSense web. The following is the message Google AdSense is returning on a two lines message.

The AdSense logo, the my user name (in this case my Gmail address, Last Login time log, the Log Out link, the Help link and a Search AdSense Help input form are the elements provided in the header.

The footer offers links to the AdSense Blog, the AdSense Forum, the Privacy Policy, the Terms & Conditions, the Program Policies.

The following is the only info given in the main part of the page:

Error

We apologize for the inconvenience, but we are unable to process your request at this time. Our engineers have been notified of this problem and will work to resolve it.

Everything you need to know, the easy and clear way

What's going on?

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NYT online brings you living infographics. The following link is on The Art of Pitching.

ADN is a free press Spanish newspaper, the paper version as well as the online version contents are published under a Creative Commons license. The paper version has a quite elegant and functional layout (you can see a pdf version here), designed by newspapers design guru, Antoni Cases (Cases i Associats studio).

For this post we'll focus our attention on the online version of ADN. The web site for ADN is, together with the French Rue89, one of the few site defining an editorial layout for online news sites.

In a previous post, Visualizing Maps: Google Analytics maps, we saw how Google Analytics maps render when extruded from their context and/or seen as a black & white image.

USA states?

Looking at the USA map where users origin is highlighted darkening the relevant state, the first thing that stands out is you have to know the state name just looking at the map. If this is, or should be, a quite easy task for an American reader, things are not so obvious for someone from Europe or somewhere else. If is it true that you have the detailed list of the states, together with their relevant figures, in a table just under the map image, is it also true that if you just look at the map (as it would be in the case you take the map alone to insert it in a custom layout for printing/slide show) it's not so immediate to find out the state name.

Visualizing maps is a key factor when dealing with statistics and complex data, online maps as the ones used by Google Analytics, the Google service for web statistics, could take advantage of the internet medium to enhance the user interaction but what happens when you have to read those same maps on a different medium (say you what to print them) or with a different format size?

It looks like there's something like Black Hat Information Architecture, that is implementing an on purpose bad IA to cheat on your user, and gain some money playing on your user distraction or misunderstanding of the rules.

You probably know Ryan Air a low cost airline operating mainly in Europe, as quite all low cost airlines (depending on the Country they operate/advertise, as in some place now things are changing) they advertise flight at extremely low prices (as low as 0.1 Euro) without putting too much emphasis on the airport/security/fuel surcharge. The resulting fare might rise to tens or hundreds of Euros even if the starting (read advertised) price is just cents. We are no dummy anynore, and already know the trick. That's fine.

It looks like the critics met the audience in awarding the Best Navigation/Structure Webby Award to IKEA, Dream Kitchen.

Flash revenge!

It's the revenge of Flash, and of all the silly humor you had on viewing your friends summer vacation slideshow. Well, this has interaction in it, like click and skip to next photo. Doh! (Just to be sure, I'm being sarcastic on this...)

Download the single steps of my graphical revisitation of Bruno Munari's project methodology.

Project methodology icons, some example

Download the whole pack (eps format).

Project Methodology by Bruno Munari

Wikipedia post on Bruno Munari:

Bruno Munari (October 24, 1907 – September 30, 1998) was an Italian desginer, who contributed fundamentals in many fields of visual arts (paint, sculpture, film, industrial design, graphics) and non visual arts (literature, poetry, didactic) with the research on the game subject, infancy and creativity.

In his book Da cosa nasce cosa (I don't know if there's an english version of this book), Munari writes about project methodology. In his words, project methodology is a needed series of operations, ordered in a logical path as given by experience. It's aim is to reach the best result with the minimum effort.

How to browse this blog

Just a reminder, before to post a fully detailed article on this blog navigation structure and on how to implement a tagged navigation on a budget.

Fine tune your blog posts titles looking at what's happening with books

There are few doubts that titles in blog posts have a big merit in optimizing your blog communication. The title of a blog post is the first part of the content, usually the bigger in terms of font size, and the one that a (human) reader first look at in search of what's the post about, the same applies to a machine reader such as an RSS feed aggregator.

Also, as part of a wider web content optimization, titles are important in terms of SEO politics, provided you follow web standards and a semantic approach and assign them the correct <H(n)> tag.

What the Webby Awards and the People Voice Awards are

The 10th of April began the People's Voice Awards voting process for the Webby Awards. Web users from around the world are called to voting for nominated web sites, filed under different cateories.