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EPpy Awards Finalists
Congrats to my buddies in Lawrence for being nominated in the “Best News Site” (LJWorld.com) category again this year, and especially to Nathan Borror, whose design for Lawrence.com is nominated in the “Best Design” category.
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World Online seeks Web Designer
The World Company in Lawrence, KS is looking for a web designer. This is where I worked before Blue Flavor, and also the place where Django was created. It’s a great place to work, full of interesting people, in a cool town. Check it out!
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KUsports.com and Lawrence.com redesigned and relaunched
Overnight, my good friends at the Journal-World got all of their sites moved onto Django 1.0, and launched major redesigns of kusports.com and lawrence.com, as well as some subtle realigned of the flagship ljworld.com. The process of moving these sites to Django 1.0 has been ongoing for literally like two years, as they were previously running on a Django revision somewhere between .90 and .91. Now that they’re all caught up with the latest and great and have swanky new designs to work within, I hope to see my old team get back to what they do best: coving Lawrence like no other local paper in the world covers their beat. Congrats, guys.
For the curious, I believe the design work on Lawrence.com is primarily the work of Nathan Borror and kusports.com was lead by Christian Metts (guys, correct me if I’m wrong on that).
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LJWorld.com: Race for U.S. Senate
Once again loving Nathan Borror’s information design for the election results in Lawrence, KS. It gets a little bit better every time — and it was kick ass the first time.
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This Week in Django: Discussion with Eric Holscher
I’ve recently had the pleasure of hanging out with Eric a few times, and I’ve gotta say: he one cool dude. Super nice, super chill, and super smart. Here, he talks with Kevin Fricovsky about several things Django, including his awesome work in Django testing and debugging and his new day job at World Online in Lawrence (for the sake of disclosure, Eric was not at World Online when I was). Good stuff.
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Alex
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Jacob
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James
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Shanda and Dan
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Christian and Me
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The James
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Xian
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Jacob Kaplan-Moss: Sailing on…
My man Jacob is leaving the Lawrence Journal-World for a startup that’s going to let him working on Django itself most of the time. Hard to blame him for that. Should be great for Jacob and great for Django. Congrats, man!
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My old employer, looking for designers and developers
The awesome team I worked with in Lawrence before joining Blue Flavor is looking to fill several new openings. Designers and developers alike will want to check these job descriptions out. Trust me, this is a great place to work, especially if you have an interest in editorial design online and/or working with Python and Django.
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Matt Croydon: Why I’m not worried about Google News Local
A picture is worth a thousand words.
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LJWorld.com: Kansas Democratic Presidential Caucuses
My old cronies at the Journal-World continue to find innovative new ways to do database journalism. Today, they’re using the new Google charts API to display pie graphs of Kansas caucus results, and they’re also streaming the results to Twitter in near real-time. Awesome.
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Digital Edge Awards finalists announced
Once again, my boys back in Lawrence are finalists for several Edgies. LJWorld.com is nominated for Best Overall News Site, Best Design and Site Architecture, and Most Innovative Multimedia Storytelling (for 24 Hours in Lawrence). Additionally, Lawrence.com is a finalist for Best Local Guide or Entertainment Site. Is it just me, or did the Edgies used to hve an award for sports sites?
Anyway, congrats to all the finalists — especially my buddies back in Lawrence. We’ll have to get everyone together and have some drinks — that LJWorld.com redesign we did seemed to pay off!
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Authentic Jobs: Want my old job at World Online?
Mediaphormedia, the company formerly known as World Online, is hiring a Senior Interaction Designer — basically, my old job. I can testify that this is a tremendous company to work for and that Lawrence, KS is a wonderful place to live and work. The town is cool, the bars are great, the music scene is phenomenal (maybe better than Seattle!) and the cost of living is insanely low. This is a great, great gig for someone out there. Feel free to e-mail me if you want more info on the company, the job, or Lawrence.
Also, on the name “Mediaphormedia” (I can say this, now that I’m not there anymore): It sucks. We know it. No one likes it. But there were intellectual property concerns over World Online (which was never a very good name, itself), and upper management (which is normally very “with it”) made a rash, hasty decision on a new name. Oh well. Still a damn cool place to work. They just got brand new offices, too.
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vienna.at/party: Lawrence.com does Europe.
Compare and contrast: Ours. Theirs.
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The myth of content and presentation separation
One of the hallmark attributes of web standards-based design is the concept that proper use of semantic (X)HTML and CSS completely abstracts the presentation of a site from its content. One key real-world benefit of this separation is that come redesign time, one only needs to change or replace the CSS stylesheet, and needn’t lay so much as a finger upon the hallowed grounds we call markup. I’m here to say that this mantra isn’t much more than a fairy tale.
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2007 Knight-Batten Awards: LJWorld.com election coverage
The 2006-2007 election coverage stuff we did back at the Journal-World was named a notable entry for these Knight-Batten awards. Congrats to everyone involved — especially Nathan, who rocked all the fun Flash stuffs.
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The Shawnee Dispatch (Shawnee, Kansas)
My old cronies at the Journal-World launched yet another Django/Ellington-powered newspaper site today. Christian Metts is primarily responsible for the design work on this one (no doubt with some help from Nathan Borror and Richard Cornish).
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Grrr.
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Yet another Ellington site: Sunshine Coast Daily
APN, a leading publisher of newspapers and magazines in New Zealand and Austrailia, roll out the first of several Ellington sites they have in the works. Congrats to Anthony and the team at APN!
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Launched: Craig Daily Press, Craig, CO
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Dustin's new training room
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Simon: Doing Local Right (the blog post, this time)
Simon posted his slides from his @media presentation over the weekend, but he’s now posted a shot blog entry on the talk. He discussed local news coverage, and used LJWorld.com and Lawrence.com as his examples.
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Simon Willison @media: Doing Local Right
Simon did a short presentation on why good online local news coverage requires a dedicated, focused, talented and most of all, local team. He used our work at the Lawrence Journal-World as the basis for the presentation (Simon worked at the Journal-World for a year while he was studying here in the states). Thanks for the props, Simon!
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Typogrify: easily produce web typography that doesn’t suck
Ever since I’ve worked at the Journal-World, I’ve lamented the fact that the typography on our sites left something to be desired. Straight quotes, widows all over the place, and so forth. And even though our programmers do care about typography (one of them is even quite the type nerd!), I had trouble getting the matter at the top of anyone’s (very long) priority list. I said I’d buy several beers for the first programmer to make John Gruber’s Smartypants a default piece of Ellington, the publishing system we develop and sell. Even that wasn’t enough of an incentive.
That is, until we hired Christian Metts, a designer who also happens to be quite a good programmer. Christian must have really wanted those beers, because he went way above and beyond my request and created a library of Django template filters that is almost certainly the best thing to happen to web typography since Matthew Carter crafted Georgia. It’s called Typogrify, and it’s available at Google Code.
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An EPpy, a few LOST-Theories.com updates, tons of Django apps, and some dissapointing news about serestandar.es
It’s been a while since I’ve written a blog entry. The reason isn’t because I’ve had nothing to say about the web. Rather, I’ve been working on a couple of web-related articles for other publications that should see the light of day pretty soon. I’m promise I’ll get back to my regular blogging schedule soon. In the meantime, here’s a handful of updates on various things.
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ESPN.com collects pair of online media awards
ESPN.com won the high-traffic counterpart to KUSports.com’s EPpy award today. I link this mostly because of the KUSports.com mention. :)
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2007 EPpy Winners Announced: BoomerGirl.com wins!
The EPpy awards were presented today, and our BoomerGirl.com (which I designed) won for Best Newspaper-Affiliated Web Site. Congrats to Cathy and the rest of the people involved in BoomerGirl.com. I’m pretty excited about this — gotta admit, having an EPpy award winner on the resume can’t hurt! :)
KUSports.com also won for Best Sports Web Site, a category which it has taken several times. I didn’t design the current iteration of it, but I’m set to redesign it later this year. Big shoes to fill.
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LJWorld.com / Multimedia
A page we’ve always wanted to have on the site but never had taken the time to build. Christian threw it together quite nicely early this week. I think it’s a fun, exploratory view into the various types of content we publish.
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LJWorld redesign
Nathan led the design process for the reworked LJWorld.com, and he posts some thoughts on the matter. The site’s design is intend “to disappear,” he says — which is great. While you’re over there, poke around Nathan’s personal site a bit. He’s gave it a slight facelift for May 1. It’s not a redesign, but there are a lot of nice new little details.
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LJWorld.com: Redesigned
We finally got our Lawrence Journal-World website redesign out the door. There is still much left to do, but it’s live and working. The design work here was led by Nathan Borror, with support from Christian Metts, and I personally think it’s brilliant. It’s much cleaner and less cluttered than most newspaper websites, and I think the readability on the site is really, really good. One of my favorite features, as a user of the site, is the new “everything we published today” feature. Unlike most online newspaper archives, this accounts not only for new stories, but also for blog entries, podcasts, photos, galleries, videos, and more.
Like I said, there’s still a lot to do to get LJWorld.com where we want it, but getting this out the door is 90% of the battle. We completely redesigned the site using much cleaner HTML and CSS than before, and we’ve (finally) migrated our own site to use all the latest Ellington goodies our clients have been using for a while now. We’ve set ourselves up for much, much faster iterative development — both from a functionality and design perspective — so we can roll more new stuff our more quickly.
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LJWorld.com Marketplace: our latest creation
In our continued effort to serve the local Lawrence community, we at the Journal-World have just launched one of our biggest projects in quite a while. We call it Marketplace. Marketplace is almost certainly the best local business directory ever created. Google and Yahoo! will continue to try to provide local services, but we’ll always have something they don’t: a real, sincere understanding of what our community is all about.
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It works, bitches.
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It works, bitches.
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Triple OT: The 50th Anniversary of 1957 Championship
A nice example of multimedia storytelling over at KUSports.com. I put together the initial design for this one, but David Ryan and Christian Metts, our newest designer, took it to the next level while I was away at Southby. Great work, guys.
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David
Jeff Croft
I’m a digital product designer and developer in Seattle, WA. I currently work with nGen Works, and recently co-founded Lendle, a Kindle book sharing service.
Some of my clients include Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Copious, The New York Review of Books, The Lawrence Journal-World, and the University of Washington.
I’ve authored two books on web and interactive design and spoken at dozens of conferences around the world.
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