What _is_ a home page "like"?

After some dialogue about the history of Times Travel section use of 
photos as links to more information inside, Rich Meislin said:
> So maybe that newspaper design stuff is working itself into the 
> unconscious of those Web designers.

Any web page designers care to comment on what they are consciously
(or unconsciously) using as models? Especially when it comes to dealing 
with the ubiquitous 14" monitor, rather than the newspaper page?

Are you thinking of newspaper or magazine or advertising or book design, 
or (re)inventing design based on the available tools? (In fact, does anyone 
care to share your criteria for "good" design in this environment?) 

Even Ted Nelson's early print experiments with hypertext mention that the
Talmud did it first. (I think this is in _Literary Machines_, which
belongs on every hypertext designer's shelf... what to label the shelf is
your choice...) And I think he mentions the Times (or newspapers in
general) as doing hypertext with indexes, sidebars and page jumps. LM
attempts to use print as a model for hypertext, struggling with multipart
pages and recursive chapters (a chapter zero followed by four chapters
one, one chapter two, five chapters three, etc.), but ignores the most
conventional hypertext-in-print tools, the index and cross reference. 

To answer my own question, I suspect the available tools are the key, at 
least at this stage of online page design. (In Ted's case, the missing 
"tool" might have been a graduate student or publisher's staff to do the 
indexing and keep pace with his revisions and new editions over the years.)

The first web pages I saw, back when X-Mosaic was just being mentioned
in alt.hypertext (I had to enlist a Math grad student to download it and
let me at his SPARCstation) looked a lot like technical manuals or
government documents done with SGML, using links instead of
cross-references, but basically emulating numbered Harvard outlines and
bulleted lists. Other pages looked like the gopher menus and UNIX finger, 
plan and project files that preceded the Web. 

After Mosaic for the Mac arrived, some pages started looking like
HyperCard, some with graphic maps hiding a game of "find the link"...
and some making more moderate use of smaller Maclike icons. And 
gradually the design "pros" with newspaper and magazine experience
are finding their way to the web. These are the folks I'd like to 
hear from...

Now that every Mac owner seems to have Photoshop and 3D graphic power 
tools and libraries of buttons, backgrounds, rules and such, even
amateur page designers have a lot of choices to make, for better 
or for worse. I'm waiting for someone to do a 3-D interface to Reuters 
using a Bucky Fuller dymaxion world map morphing into an emulation of a lava 
lamp created with Hot Java... Then we'll REALLY know what's going on in the 
world...
 
Bob



P.S. As for my own models... The outline form resume model:
http://blake.oit.unc.edu/~rbstepno/bobres.html 

The "how can we fairly represent a text-intensive magazine, but put a
jazzy logo on top and link the hell out of the text in the few nights left
before the professor's course deadline" model: http://blake.oit.unc.edu/nr

(I'll spare you all my "jumble of garbage on my desk that I mean to get
organized someday" model...)

- --------------------------------------------------------------------------
Stop here if you already know (or don't care) where this thread came from:
- --------------------------------------------------------------------------
On Wed, 2 Aug 1995, Jay Anthony wrote:                                    
> The NYT Sunday Travel section has looked like that for many years now.
> Long before home pages were a gleam in anyone's eye. Extrapolate in
> moderation.

and On Wed, 2 Aug 1995, Rich Meislin agreed:

> ... that's been the design of page one of the
> Sunday Travel section for many years now -- far longer than anyone has
> heard of the World Wide Web.
> 
> So maybe that newspaper design stuff is working itself into the unconscious
> of those Web designers.
> 

all this started because > At 10:39 AM 8/2/95, Jeff Greene wrote:
> >Even as Knight-Ridder closes its research facility in Colorado and
> >Times Mirro closes its multimedia gig, I'm not yet worried that
> >newspapers are shying away from all things online. In fact, I think
> >this Internet stuff is working its way into the unconscious of
> >newspaper designers.
> >
> >Check out the NYTimes' Travel section on Sundays. I happened to peer
> >at it this weekend. There are NO stories on the front page. Just large
> >pictures with headlines and teaser paragraphs, and the page numbers of
> >where you'll find the stories inside. Add the hypertext in your head
> >and you'll see that the section front is a home page on paper.
> >
> >Just a thought.
> >
> 
> ..................................................................
> Rich Meislin                                   meislin@nytimes.com
> Senior Editor, Information & Technology        212 556 1481
> The New York Times
> 
> 
> 

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End of online-news-digest V1 #268
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From rballard@cnj.digex.net Tue Sep 26 02:13:14 1995
Status: O
X-Status: