A slew of folks this evening sent me a copy of an e-mail that they received tonight.
It’s an announcement of a new product. Something that should make putting out a well-designed newspaper — even without designers — much easier. As the sales pitch says:
Never before has world-class media design been so available, so accessible, so affordable.
Ouch!
From Roger Black, of all people:
Now, here’s my question.
For years, we’ve been telling designers that they’re a vital part of the process. That their ideas, their creativity and their ability to brainstorm visual solutions can be — and should be — a vital part of their publications.
But now, we can eliminate them entirely.
So which is it? Are newspaper designers visual journalists or are they production monkeys, easily replaced by a set of slick templates?
Just. Add. Content. Son of a bitch. I’ve just spent much of the past ten years teaching young designers and editors that design IS content. If you do it right.
I’m shocked by this. Much moreso than I was the Gannett hubbing announcement last week.
I’m also wondering if I should send back my Roger Black fan club card and my secret decoder ring.
I’m not sure what the outrage is here. It looks like they are basically offering off-the-rack redesigns. It’s no different than hiring Roger Black, except I assume it’s much cheaper and not customized. Designers would still be crucial to adapt the templates to the content on a daily basis, right?
I’d feel a lot better, Dave, if Roger made that clear somewhere in the literature for that site. I just crawled all over it. I don’t see that, nor is it in the videos.
Something like, “Now, these templates are just starter files. They will NOT replace a good, creative designer working with local editors and reporters to cook up unique approaches to your particular day-to-day content needs.”
Given what’s happening in the business these days, I’d argue Roger and company really needs to add something like that. Unless they don’t believe it themselves.
Very pretty pages, but a scary premise if they, indeed, feel the designer can be eliminated. Then again, many of us are already reduced to being paginators and nothing more …
Many of the pages shown are cookie cutter. But there are examples where real design is taking place. How do you template that? I just don’t see how this works. There has to be some adaptation.
Charles, I’m sure you have already tried contacting Black. I’m interested in reading how he explains this.
Like I said, I think the way he’s going about promoting it is wrong, but the idea itself isn’t entirely that bad.
He has the Excelsior highlighted on the front page as an example of custom-made templates. Didn’t that redesign win a ton of SND awards in 2007? It looks like he made the templates for that.
Roger has got to emphasize that designers are essential to the process. He can do that when he fixes the broken links on the page.
I don’t get it. Do you send them the content – or do they give you an InDesign doc with a bunch of empty boxes?
Photographers and reporters should love this as much as the designers.
I don’t know that this solution eliminates designers from the process.
I guess it depends on management. If they want you to strictly fill the boxes in as they have been given to you, then you don’t need designers – photographers can do that in their spare time.
Yeah, this is basically “Redesign in a Box” — but it’s marketed as a method to skip over the design process. Just add content. For little papers with near to no resources? Some possible use. For larger papers? You can do this yourself.
Meg: Excelsior started to work with page templates (and a very unique editorial workflow on their newsroom) on March 2008, after they won several awards for their 2007 redesign. As other said, the idea isn’t that bad, it could make easier (and faster) the work for designers and editors, but one thing is true, this is NOT a magical solution, still being necessary the expert eye of a designer to find the best layout template for the inside pages (and to make the daily adjusts to these pages) and to work with section fronts, which I think can’t be 100% templated.