Not including ads, the page is 1.1 MB w/ 800KB of chart images and 100KB of css that was mistakenly included (whoops).
We did discuss just publishing a .txt or .nfo file instead, but some of the charts required a bit of ASCII cheating and being able to adjust font size & weight of labels really made them a lot more readable.
There are still BBS's around. You just need to look. There are some BBS art on sixteencolors and some of the art packs have addresses for some BBS systems.
It was totally charming and i scrolled through it with a smile. But you know what - didn't really read it, it's pretty hard to read actually. Not sure that's what you want to be going for as a news organization.
50 charts and tables is a lot to consume on a webpage no matter how you slice it.
The original magazine presentation - 6 full page spreads with 8 or 9 charts each - is way more readable. The higher information density of paper lets you glance at 9 companies at once and spend more time with what looks interesting. We tried to preserve some of the serendipity online with the short preview sentences on the left column, but the linear scroll through the charts takes away from that and makes it feel a little too chore like.
Sometimes translating to digital invites amazing improvements through interactivity (see what is code), but here we had a tight deadline and too many charts to redo them all in an interesting way w/ d3 so the digital focus was much more on the design side.
I really like the look of this! Why all the negativity? Just because Bloomberg did it? The simple truth is that positioned text (and, in this case, discretely positioned fixed width text) is a wonderful format for conveying information. The combination of scroll-advance, the way contrast is used to focus - I say, really cool looking.
My only criticism was the boy in the moon animation to the left of the company list. That was distracting and made the UI feel chaotic. I also don't like the (full color) banner ads - they could have at least got one of their sponsors to do an ASCII art version of their ads!
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 43.2 ms ] thread- Dolly Parton
We did discuss just publishing a .txt or .nfo file instead, but some of the charts required a bit of ASCII cheating and being able to adjust font size & weight of labels really made them a lot more readable.
Ever since Joshua Topolsky joined Bloomberg, this novelty-over-form style is everywhere.
:-)
The original magazine presentation - 6 full page spreads with 8 or 9 charts each - is way more readable. The higher information density of paper lets you glance at 9 companies at once and spend more time with what looks interesting. We tried to preserve some of the serendipity online with the short preview sentences on the left column, but the linear scroll through the charts takes away from that and makes it feel a little too chore like.
Sometimes translating to digital invites amazing improvements through interactivity (see what is code), but here we had a tight deadline and too many charts to redo them all in an interesting way w/ d3 so the digital focus was much more on the design side.
My only criticism was the boy in the moon animation to the left of the company list. That was distracting and made the UI feel chaotic. I also don't like the (full color) banner ads - they could have at least got one of their sponsors to do an ASCII art version of their ads!