Kathlyn Clore

Earlier this year, I had the good fortune to visit Lisbon for a lovely long holiday weekend.

Portugal is now home to one of the more interesting newspaper startups (yep, you saw me put those two words next to each other) I’ve read about, called i.

Peter Preston briefly profiled it in The Guardian at the start of October. The Editor’s Weblog, in Paris, profiled it last week and the NYT took note yesterday.

Here’s a video - with English subtitles - showing a “day in the life” of the staff at i:

What makes i an interesting product?

Its magazine-style layout, for one, with bold colors and lots of cutouts. It’s design is so nice, in fact, that the Society of News Design recognized it as the best designed newspaper in Spain and Portugal.

Second, its information architecture is radically different from that of a traditional serious daily. From the NYT:

“So i puts the op-ed pieces at the front of the paper. They are followed by political, business and other news stories — all jumbled together, rather than separated by subject. An article on a political scandal in Lisbon could appear alongside a piece on a Wall Street deal, for example.

“We approached the design from the way the reader thinks, not the way editors think or the way newsrooms are organized,” Mr. Avillez Figueiredo said. He said research showed that readers paid little attention to distinctions between sections and simply looked for the most interesting headlines.”

I completely agree with Figueiredo’s perspective here: When I scroll through my RSS feeds, Twitter or even a destination site like NYT or WSJ, I am always looking for the most interesting headlines. Increasingly, this tendancy is starting to translate to how I read printed newspapers.

So far, circulation and subscription figures at i look good.

I know I’d love to read it.

I’m really sorry to those of you who either:

Miss Earth contestants and their inability to use correct capitalization

1. Have native languages that call for capitalization of all nouns (This means you, Deutschland!);

2. Learned to speak MySpace before English.

Still: the awful Internet tendency to either capitalize or lowercase random words which should not be not capitalized or lowercased has to stop. Please.

I’m normally not a stringent grammar person. I thank goodness I have found the Grammar Girl podcast series (which is, happily, very searchable) so I can find quick and dirty tricks to help me remember how and when to use “comprise”. And I probably have to turn to my AP or Guardian (or EJC, or European Commission, or Times, or or or!) more times than I should.

But the capitalization issue, along with random or missing articles (the/an/a) are driving me crazy in an editing project with which I am currently busy. I’m editing what is essentially a series of encyclopedia articles about media conditions in a particular country, all written by non-native English speakers.

I thought Mario Garcia asked a great question on his design/innovation blog when he asked, “Do we associate all things Internet with lower case?”

This question, and Garcia’s redesign of the Daily Handelsblatt, a German newspaper, sparked a series of posts about whether the paper should use a logo with an uppercase “H”.

I most liked these two quotes Garcia posted on this topic:

From Oliver Reichenstein, lead designer of zeit.de, tagesanzeiger.ch and krone.at: “Yes, many internet users believe that internet is all about ‘lower case’ as the urls are fed so, therefore anything that is associated with it should reflect it. I think the truth is while the url in ‘lowercase’ is only a function of the medium, the internet, where the information being served, it has nothing to do with the branding of the Online product. On the contrary the Online property is best represented with a look that can then be extended to other areas and in this instance by the square in the brand colour and the cap ‘H’ - a direct take-out from the brick and mortar presence of the product.”

Also, from Rodrigo Fino, Garcia Media Latin America/Buenos Aires: “Lowercase was used because of technical restrictions years ago. Today all internet browsers and email programs understand uppercase.”

Exactly! So regardless of technology, branding or generational differences, can’t we all just go ahead and just embrace correct usage of English, which does not call for capitalization of anything other than proper nouns? Please?

Even online!

Sipping a cocktail at Noobia Cafe on the Miradouro de Santa Catarina in Lisbon this evening with two women I met at my hostel, I had the chance to revisit an idea I first heard discussed by my current boss, and that is the idea that it would be of great benefit to engage designers and journalists in a dialogue.

By designers I mean architects and people who do design the products we use in our everyday lives. And by journalists I mean people who report and craft stories (on television, print or Internet).

Both of these professional groups are involved in communicating ideas to the public in a functional way. Both professional groups display their work for the public to enjoy, in public spaces or places of business.

And increasingly, these groups must do the work of cutting through ubiquitous corporate communications messages… which is to say, advertising and PR messages delivered on the part of big institutions private and public.

Maybe this is too academic, but I think these groups could have some good input for each other.

Somewhat along these lines, I saw that CNN International will be showing soon a longish interview with Dutch architect Rem Koolhas. I do not profess to know a lot about architecture, but I am learning more all the time and I know that so far I really like his style. So I am curious to see what he is talking about.

I am not a designer, but over the past years I have realized the importance of layout, typefaces, fonts… and design thinking. It seems that aesthetics are increasingly important to consumers of everything electronics (think iPhone) as well as media consumers on and offline.

Tangentially, in traveling around in Europe and the US, I have become much more aware of architecture. And it seems that “design thinking” is a good way to approach many of the problems the media world is wrestling with.

So it did not surprise me that this TED Talk was given by a former architect…