Category Archives: rosa

a serious shot at screen reading

Another new online magazine: Triple Canopy (noted by Ed Park). Unlike Issue and Rosa B. this isn’t a design magazine – although the content is very interesting – but like them, it’s a serious attempt to construct a new kind of magazine for the screen-reading environment. While Rosa B.‘s design uses the affordances of dynamic layering, Issue concentrates on reader annotation, Triple Canopy simply does away with the scroll bar.
Removing the scroll bar is an obvious idea for improving screen reading that’s only rarely implemented: when you read text with a scroll bar (like this blog), the reader is forced to remove their concentration from the text to scroll down and then to find where the reading left off. It’s something we’re all quite used to, but that doesn’t mean it’s an advantageous reading behavior; we put up with because we rarely have a choice. Triple Canopy reverts from the scroll bar to the paged model of the codex book: if you click on the “+” sign to the right of the page, a new page slides in. It’s obvious where to resume reading. The text itself is well-cared for: it’s presented in columns of legible width, another lesson of print design that’s too often ignored in the online world. Worth noting as well is the way that images are integrated into some of the texts; again, there’s a clear and understood model for how reading works. Video can be slotted into some of the pieces without causing a disturbance or overwhelming: it appears on a page by itself, meant to be the primary focus of attention.
It’s not entirely perfect: while the “+” sign always advances a page, “–” sometimes goes back a page and sometimes goes to the previous article (if clicked on the first page of the article). I wish clicking the “triplecanopy” at the bottom took you back to the issue’s table of contents and not the magazine’s front page. Because the site’s made in HTML, the design breaks if you increase or decrease the font size in your browser. And the Powerpoint-style wipe when the pages change quickly grows tiresome. But these are minor quibbles with a design that’s overwhelmingly successful. I’ll be curious to see if this is sustainable over more issues.

rosa b.

A quick note to point out Rosa B, a new online publication in French and English from the CAPC Museum of Contemporary Art Bordeaux and the Bordeaux School of Fine Arts. Their first issue, online now, is about contemporary publishing and edited by the very interesting Thomas Boutoux. More of an art slant than a business one, but the features would probably interest readers of this site: an interview with Stuart Bailey of dot dot dot and Dexter Sinister about his publishing and design-related activities; novelist and critic Matthew Stadler talks about the social space of reading; and a nicely excerpted bit of Friedrich Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, which has been out in English translation for a while but could stand more readers.
Worth noting as much as the content is the form: Rosa B. is clearly designed for online reading, and takes advantages of the affordances of the web; it’s nice to see texts on reading that have been designed by someone who thinks about how they’ll be read. Texts overlap and intersect with other texts and illustrations; long filmed interviews mix with text amiably.