CD Studio Diary — Part I
Ever since I checked out the syllabus of the MDes program, I have been excited about the communication design studio. :)
Week One
TUESDAY
I reached the first class, somewhat exhausted after a fast walk from my TAship class, and the first thing I saw was everyone sitting on the floor, circled around a bunch of cute little wind-up toys! Stacie and Brett demonstrated each one of them and then we passed them around, and it was so much fun to see the toys give their own unique performances. We had a little baby toy, a squirrel, two robots, an angry nun, an octopus, a centipede… we had a whole toy story going on. The robots were somewhat older and had been played with a lot, and I guess they didn’t mind just chilling and watching other toys being played with. :P
This exercise helped me reflect on the element of surprise. All of the toys made us happy, but some of them more so. Those were the toys who responded in a pleasantly unexpected way. For instance, the little baby crawled from one end of the room to another in less than a minute, and everyone squealed with joy. The squirrel circled around her own tail and showed off her food, and all of us were delighted.
We moved further to a group project, which revolved around news websites. I am teamed up with Isha and Michelle, and it is quite a lot of fun. It is interesting how we notice different elements of the same subject matter. We went through international news sites BBC, Le Monde, Reuters, and Al Jazeera.
THURSDAY
It is Thursday today, and we are discussing all the websites viewed by our class together. I can see such a vast spread of styles, across all these news sites. In many of these sites, it is straightaway a digitization of the standard newspaper layout. Is that the best way to design a news website? I am not sure. There are also some sites who have a slightly social-media-like feel to them, like the Huff Post, where articles are laid out one by one, similar to a news feed. Every news site has its own style of intriguing the reader, like Al Jazeera has photos that are really zoomed in onto an event, and seemed to be provoking stronger emotions.
Week Two
TUESDAY
With reference to the reading Crisp — Typography dynamics in different sites, using type to define the identity of the news company.
THURSDAY
There was a last-45-minutes rush for our presentations, and then an amazing flow of groups presenting their research and insights around different types of news websites.
Group 1 — Amanda/Diana/Amrita/Stefania
They made a nice opening using sketches of these websites’ homepages. References to their taglines and style of written content was a good way to explain the voice of each website. There was great coordination between speaker and illustrator roles. A comparative analysis of sites using one single news piece gave me an idea of their depth of content and bias levels. Even though it felt somewhat fast-paced to me, and I struggled with processing numbers, one key takeaway for me was the process of how identities of companies get built, through their visual structures, writing styles, and which part of a news piece do they stress upon — or don’t.
Group 2 — Nandini/Yiwei/JiYoung/Christianne — US Powerhouses
They had really nice illustrations, and it was interesting to see how they made a complete picture towards the end. Their presentation made me think about how companies evolve through time, with the purpose of surviving, and building trust — through experiments with content, media forms, and revenue models.
Group 3 — Bhakti/Hannah/Corine/Deepika— Alternative news
With this presentation, I was able to understand alternative news as reflections on current events, completely based on the group’s beliefs. Although their scales are insignificant compared to powerhouses like NYT — in terms of audience, revenue and engagement. To me, this type of newsgroups seemed like rebels, whose impacts might be less frequent, but have the potential to run deep. Their philosophies might feel skewed, but could also be revolutionary. I usually trust groups who have a balanced opinion, close to neutral, but this presentation made me interested.
Group 4 — Anna/Eustina/Anuprita — Fairly neutral
I thought their opening was very interesting, with an analysis of mobile notifications from news apps, particularly because everyone in the audience can relate to mobile notifications. Because we were up next, I was a bit occupied in last-minute prep! But this presentation still made me think more about the consumption of news — or content in general. I reflected on fresh news updates versus editorial news articles, and thought about which is more valuable to me — personally?
Group 5 — Us! (Myself/Michelle/Isha) — International News
I am a very introverted person and presenting always gets my pulse fluctuating, but it made this event more memorable. :) The most enjoyable moment from the script of our presentation was to enact a personified version of Reuters, a long-established news company who is popular with businesses, has extremely neutral points of view, and a history of providing trading insights. Michelle imitated BBC as someone with a lot of institutional trust, and yet sporadic and random about what they say. Isha imitated Le Monde, dressed with flair and finesse. Then all three of us together personified Aljazeera, as a millennial. A lot of my peers appreciated this part. I felt happy to know that they enjoyed, even noticed details like how we had dressed up to suit the news channel we were representing!
Group 6 — Sanika/Jisoo/Michelle Chou/Ranu-Conservative Leaning
I really liked their character illustrations, for the different newsgroups they had studied. They also made great use of timelines, and gradients, which gave me an idea of the evolution of these news channels. The lifecycle of a news story was explained well. There was also a play of narrative and illustration going on together, with one person reading from a script, and one or two other people drawing on the whiteboard.
Weekend Two — Reflection
on the findings, insights, and our process as a team
In the era of global communications networks, international news is becoming increasingly important. Mainstream news organizations are in a strong position to offer international coverage to keep the world population informed. But who are international news websites targeting? What does it mean to be truly international news? Defined as world news or foreign coverage news media from abroad, about a country or a global subject, international news is advertised and marketed to inform everyone. They inform with news that matters to everyone. However, with the shift from a media environment of daily newspapers and local television broadcasts to an environment that includes satellite television and the Internet, our society forces us to reexamine who actually receives the news. We are forced to ask questions such as: are we concerned with how much news is produced worldwide? How much is available to an interested citizen? Or how much a less-engaged citizen is likely to encounter in an ordinary day? At the center of these questions is a shift from a media environment where content is a scarce resource to one where content is abundant and attention is scarce and not reliable. All the transformations the digital age has brought to journalism — changes in business models, distribution channels, and working methods — relate to the challenges of this paradigm shift. From our analysis on the BBC, Aljazeera, Le Monde, and Reuters, we see that international news audience is becoming broader, but not deeper. By diving deeper into these website’s backend systems, visual structure, form, and content framing, our group made important discoveries and intervention points around trust, bias, and overall transparency in news delivery that we believe will help produce better-informed citizens.
Looking closely at our websites back end systems, information architecture, visual form, and content framing, we see how their unique identities are felt on their respective platforms. These identities helped each of these news companies establish themselves; this perception and legacy thus attract different audience bases and forms different biases.
Our first news site that we analyzed was the BBC. BBC has a legacy around it leading it to be the most neutral news source. The BBC is government-owned and subscription-based. They have over 6 billion dollars in revenue through government charters, taxes and etc. They have a little over two thousand journalists, the majority being white males. BBC first started as a TV channel. On their website and social media handles, we can see many video snippets or screenshots of their TV channel broadcast. With a lot of engaging visual content, concise articles, they effectively engage their average user for almost four minutes. Unfortunately, the website is very inconsistent in terms of content, layout, typography, colors and CSS transitions. The most notable example of inconsistency was seeing a makeup article next to a Brexit story. Typography involves a mix of Helvetica, Arial, and Curious.
We next looked at Aljazeera. Aljazeera was founded in 1996 and is owned by the state of Qatar. Because of its location in the middle east and its ownership, Aljazeera is seen as catering to the west and thus is polluted with many conspiracy theories. They have over 450 diverse journalists all Muslim in faith. Its nascency makes Aljazeera very modern looking in style. They exhibit powerful images that provoke strong emotions. The color palette is neutral with only one accent color, which resonates with their brand language. Typography reflects set guidelines, in a clear Helvetica Neue for headlines and short descriptions. Georgia is being used for the long text of news articles. Aljazeera has the second-lowest engagement time is two minutes. Because of how inconsistent the perception of Aljazeera is, most of its audience comes from the United States.
Le Monde has primarily been a daily afternoon newspaper and their online presence shows an editorial exclusive look. Comprising of only one hundred and fifty writers, mostly white french males, Le Monde is independently run. They survive only from subscriptions. Their website includes mostly written content, with next to no photos or videos. Their writing style is eloquent and highly opinionated, with articles as long as 2000 words. The typography belongs to a single Walbaum family. Serif styles are used frequently, yet with elegance. Because of how highly exclusive Le monde is, their audience is very niche and solely french.
Reuters is the second-highest revenue news site next to the BBC. The get their resources through ads, subscriptions, and donations. They have over three thousand journalists all heavily white males. Reuters established itself with trading services for enterprises, and on their website, we can see stock exchange numbers, graphs. Their website also displays sponsored news before anything else. Reuters also did not always have a proper distinction between different types of news. Their information architecture had little to no hierarchy. Their audience is more business and finance centric. Overall Reuters is a very neutral news source.
In addition to understanding the history, size of the organization, underlying form and the content framing, we analyzed the visibility of the news sources and viewer engagement. We synthesized our findings to answer questions such as how do these websites garner traffic? and how is this traffic retained on the websites? We crafted a matrix based on Form and Content (on the X-axis) and biases (on the Y-axis) respectively. After plotting all 4 sources on this matrix, we overlaid information about the organic traffic and the average time spent by the user on each.
The matrix instantly helped us see that what holds viewers is low bias content evident from websites like BBC and Reuters. From this synthesis, we believe viewers are not worried about form, but more about reliable content. We believe that this is supported by Denise Gonzales Crisp’s idea that ‘every person and enterprise is entrenched in a number of potent systems’. We argue that since the viewers of international news belong to multiple ‘systems’, they have varied opinions. When it comes to international news, conveying facts without an undertone of bias is imperative. Creating this ‘transparency’ and giving insight on the news sources back end systems can give audience space to form their own opinions. Providing a neutral perspective has the power to level every individual on the same plane, despite the systems they belong to. This transparency would create trustworthy and reliable news and better-informed citizens. Viewers can then supplement their belief system by having the opportunity to be exposed to multiple sources. The coexistence of opinions, and not biases, would help shape well rounded tolerant citizens. From this analysis, we believe that to be a trustworthy international news source, news websites must cultivate a perception of low bias in their tone of writing and presentation of opinions.
Week 3
Stay tuned… for more stories of class activities, and an intervention concept for international news!
