Fast Company Redesign
It's always exciting and interesting when a large company announces change. After all if there is something that defines human existence it's change, and the constant evolution of human communication. It's in our nature to tinker with our surroundings, and even more so to communicate our presence to everyone and anyone willing to listen. This of course has resulted in many fine and revolutionary changes in the way we communicate, and ever since the advent of the Web, we have explored an almost unmeasurably different way to tell our stories within this new media. As important as telling stories, is the ability to communicate news. It is for these very reasons why I get excited when such large media organisations such as FastCompany.com or New York Times announce that they are doing things differently. We have all looked in wonder at the beauty that can be used and expressed over at the New York Times in their delivery of the news. For a company with such a huge heritage to not only promote and build on but also to preserve, it was no small feat in producing it's latest iteration. I was fortunate enough to be in the position to attend the Society of Newspaper Designers annual conference in Boston Sept 2007, where among the likes of Mark Porter (lead designer for the Guardian), was the duo from the NY Times whom have been responsible for the transformation of their online pressence, Khoi Vinh and Tom Bodkin. Their dual presentation about the innovations that the NYTimes online was experiencing was compelling and inspiring. One got the sense that we are only starting along the line of where digital media can take news information. This sentiment was echoed by many people at the conference, from the traditional designers at the Globe and Mail from Toronto Canada, through to the presentation by Mark Porter. However it was the presentation by Nick Bilton and Michael Rogers "The Future is Now", which really got my attention. The presentation was going along fine, if not a little conservatively, "this is what we are doing now, this is a cool new thing...", it was in the last 10mins in which that magical word "Ubiquitous" was mentioned, which added weight to the idea that the NYTimes is looking truly to the future. I will be looking to the coming 2008 conference of the SND in Sept at Vegas. Which is combined with the APME (Associated Press Managing Editors), in which it has been mooted that the whole notion of a ubiquitous information environment might very well be discussed. It is with this same enthusiasm that I look forward to the coming changes afoot at Fastcompany.com. As we know this won't be the final change for this organistaion, but I am hoping that there is enough of a sense of a road map for future consideration of innovation in the dissemination of information. But before we can run we need to learn to walk on the nuts and bolts (so to speak), hmm where to stick navigation?
