re: Photographs (and their web interfaces)
April 12, 2009
[I'm trying something new here. I'm going to respond to someone's blog post assuming they read my blog. This is what blogs do, anyway, isn't it? I think maybe by doing this I'm becoming a better blogger! Yeah, that's it.]
My friend Lin Swimmer from Uncle Ofay's Good-Times Story Corner just posted about photographs, specifically photojournalism that appears on the web. He criticizes:
My only complaint is that we are still in a transitional period where not everyone is utilizing Flash gallery presentation to optimize slideshows for the web.
I couldn't agree more. Have you checked out The Boston Globe's Big Picture? In addition to the beautiful photography, the site (refreshingly) does not use flash for its galleries. It just sticks a lot of big photos on the page. While your NYT example is probably one of the better flash galleries I've seen, I'll take Big Picture's simple no-flash approach over it any day. I hate having to figure out a new interface all the time. (Not to mention the fact that most flash interfaces ignore the "Back" button in web browsers, the occasional loading issues, or the many other arguments against Flash. Hell, the phrase "hate flash" gets 14 million hits.)
The New York Times has several awesome people making great use of the internet. From Khoi Vinh's elegant (and standard-setting) grid-based layout of the entire site, to those in charge of the charts (interactive or not), to, well, just about anyone working on the website in general... they get it. I personally love On The Street with Bill Cunningham, where a sweet old guy narrates photos of style trends.
Back to the photo gallery interface issue, I do like how Burn lets you expand the images to nearly the full screen, but that's about all I like about the interface. (The photos, though! Oh wow. You should have told me about this the instant you discovered it, my friend.)
But my favorite galleries? Those that easily let me download all the images quickly, so that I can use my own choice of software (either OSX's built-in Quick Look or Marc Wandschneider's JustLooking) to view the images.
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April 12, 2009 at 3:44 AM
Ugg... And now I know why responding like this might have been a bad idea. Grammar: I can't keep the proper voice. (I think that's what it's called.)