We'll talk another day about if the weather page is adesign or an infographics matter (in my opinion is a mix of both), but, as it is a daily mission for most of us, I'll tell what surprised me.
First of all, we're seeing here the rotated page. Actually, it is printed vertical, and you have to rotate the paper to read it.
The are no icons of suns, clouds... on the map. This information is showed with a text. Something I'm not used to see. They just use icons to show the weather in the week. With a child as anchorman (I suppose we'll have a different kid each day). A way to involve reader.
They also have the Navy Bases weather (my european mind doesn't understand it very well).
Big space for tides, natural, in a state with so many kilometers of coast.
I can't say nothing good or bad about it. Weather pages depend so much on their target taht, without having ever been in Virginia in my whole life, I can't have a reasoned opinion. I just can say that it's original. And it has the same target that the general redesign: involve readers, and this is something that hardly can be a failure. Original. Not a usual thing in this kind of pages...
1 comment:
Hi Chiqui -
I'm the guy who created the new weather map for the Virginian-Pilot. Hopefully, I can answer some of the questions in your post.
First, the decision to turn the page sideways for the weather came early on from our editor, Denis Finley. We all liked the idea, although I needed a little time to get used to doing it in that format, and it would be something visually different for our readers.
On an earlier, working version, I did have some icons to go with the cities on the big regional map on the left side of the page but they never quite worked. Besides, we had those icons at the top of the page along with the weather kid so I wanted to keep it simple. Also, I knew we would be running an ad down the left side of the page and I wanted to keep things simple on that side of the page.
As for the navy bases, Norfolk Virginia is the largest naval port in the world and a lot of people who live here have family members in the Navy and a frequently going overseas to other navy bases.
We recently got a lot of data back from a survey conducted for the paper, basically 177 people responded and 71% thought the weather page was an improvement from the old one, 12% thought it was worse, and the remaining 17% were indifferent.
You can read a complete post over at Viz Eds at the bottom of this thread -http://www.visualeditors.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=40709#SlideFrame_1
Take care :-)
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