The story was good, but I was intrigued by the format of the "article". It really catered to today's attention deficit society, in a good way. It pulled me in and I read all the way through. Normally, I would be too impatient to do so. I hope this format evolves for long-form articles, we need a change on the web.
I agree with this as I had the same experience. Somehow the use of black-and-white photography with a single colour text highlight helps to focus on the story, piece by piece. Also the placing of text in a semi-transparent magenta box right in the middle of the screen, rather than to the side as one might expect in a magazine. All works really well. I'm also a fan of the side-scrolling aspect. Somehow that has more of a linear time dimension to it than vertical scrolling.
Thanks! I'm the author of the story. The NPR Visuals team works really hard to make stuff that is substantial but that people still want to read online. Obviously we're still learning and have a long way to go, but I share your hope and we'd love your feedback on how to make it better. A goal is to figure out how to do long form using some of these techniques.
Comments
The story was good, but I was intrigued by the format of the "article". It really catered to today's attention deficit society, in a good way. It pulled me in and I read all the way through. Normally, I would be too impatient to do so. I hope this format evolves for long-form articles, we need a change on the web.
I agree with this as I had the same experience. Somehow the use of black-and-white photography with a single colour text highlight helps to focus on the story, piece by piece. Also the placing of text in a semi-transparent magenta box right in the middle of the screen, rather than to the side as one might expect in a magazine. All works really well. I'm also a fan of the side-scrolling aspect. Somehow that has more of a linear time dimension to it than vertical scrolling.
Thanks! I'm the author of the story. The NPR Visuals team works really hard to make stuff that is substantial but that people still want to read online. Obviously we're still learning and have a long way to go, but I share your hope and we'd love your feedback on how to make it better. A goal is to figure out how to do long form using some of these techniques.
For what it's worth the code that drives the story is open source: http://github.com/nprapps/lookatthis/
thanks for the github link.