Days of design potluck are lost

Issue 25 of The Sensible Internet Design Newsletter follows.

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Days of design potluck are lost

Why newspaper design struggles to set new benchmarks ... emptying our arsenals on the biggest story of our lives ... and remembering why it's fun to work on the frontier.

SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- The 24th Edition Best of Newspaper Design competition, judging for which just ended here Monday, reminds me of what happened to "Supper Club" back home in Southern Illinois.

OK, I promise I'll connect that to design. Somehow.

Starting before I was born, and lasting nearly until I left home for college, my parents were part of a circle of couples that called themselves the Supper Club. None of them had a lot of money, especially in the early days of their friendships. And our tiny burgs didn't offer much in the way of "night-on-the-town" entertainment.

So they all got together at a different couple's home once a month for a potluck dinner, drinks, smokes (hey, everyone smoked in those days), sometimes cards, but always plenty of laughs and no pretense. Supper Club grew to 13 or 14 couples at its height.

But something changed along the way that made it less fun than before.

Some of the couples started making more money. And cheap potlucks turned into progressively fancier dinners: one-upsmanship on the good plates, pricey wine instead of off-brand beer. Each couple in the rotation started trying to outdo the last for unique menu and entertainment ideas.

Once in a while, a host couple would so exceed the Supper Club standard that the next couple in line would find an excuse to shift the schedule, or postpone. Supper Club went on but it was never the same. After all, no one likes to follow a newly established benchmark.

That, friends, is exactly the phenomenon I observed during last weekend's judging.

I went to cover the event "live" for the Web site of the Society for News Design -- one of the competition sponsors, along with the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. It was enjoyable work, but even more fun because I was a neutral observer.

After all, I work on Web sites, and this is a print design competition. I haven't had a page to enter since 1995, so I can safely observe trends in the competition without any particular envy of the winners.

To be clear, the best work won. The winners were beautiful, compelling, engaging examples of design. They deserved the honors.

But the body of work of newspaper design in 2002, as represented by the tearsheets on those judging tables, simply did not constitute a benchmark year.

The design wheel

This competition goes through cycles of benchmarks. In its earliest days, more than 20 years ago, Best of Newspaper Design winners demonstrated the latest technical advances: desktop publishing and illustration, improvements in newspaper color reproduction and the emergence of specialized designers to manage those tools in newsrooms. Once in a while, you just had to give an award out of respect for the technical obstacles designers overcame in those days -- though many of the winners from then probably would not get votes today.

Sometimes entirely new publications established new frames of reference. Think USA Today. And the rise of design communities in Europe and Latin America brought ever-higher standards for excellence.

News events led benchmark years, as well. The Challenger explosion. Hurricane Andrew. The Gulf War. Olympics. And, of course, 9/11.

Except 9/11 was more than a design benchmark. It was, most likely, the biggest, most dramatic story any of us in this generation of journalism will cover in our lives. (One certainly hopes our civilizations won't face worse news, right?) If you had seen the sheer number of 2002 competition entries that covered the anniversary of 9/11, you'd know I'm right.

But anniversary pages don't set new design standards. Neither do pages that cover the victories of local major-league sports teams, or the construction of new stadiums to hold those teams. Face it: 2001 wasn't just a tough year, it was a tough year to follow when it comes to news.

So mark 9/11 as the story for which every superlative of news design was deployed, and all arrows pulled from the quiver. News consumers, regardless of their preferred medium, absorbed sobering stories arrayed in dizzying packaging. Like an overdose of allergy shots, the news and the packaging numbed them to everything else. Admit it. You were desensitized too, at least for a while.

How do you follow that?

You don't. Like my folks' Supper Club, you just put out whatever you can and hope they'll eat it. That's what the 24th Edition entries represented -- the best designers could do to sustain, but not reassert, their crafts. Last year was not the time to shift into a higher gear.

Does that feeling diminish the designs I saw this weekend? No, I still say much of the work was brilliant. Will we see new benchmark years for design? Certainly. Just give it a few years.

An affluence of competency

Another subtle milestone appears to have passed in recent competitions, as well. At some point in the past five years, newspaper design reached what I'll call affluence of competency -- a point where the vast majority of newspapers present everyday news and information reasonably well.

Or, to put it another way, you'd have to be a head-in-the-sand crackpot with a Mimeograph for a press to design a newspaper badly with all the resources available nowadays.

Very powerful desktop publishing tools have made their way downstream to even the smallest, poorest publications. And SND itself can and should take credit for an endless stream of training opportunities that raised the bar to this point.

But I think affluence of competency partly explains why this year's judging yielded a record number of winners from a less-than-record number of entries. It's simply harder to define excellence when everyone's pretty good.

That's part of the reason I like Internet design so much. Compared to the maturity, refinements and sophistication of print (yes, even that toilet paper we in the newspaper industry have printed on all these years), the Web is still Frontierland. You don't have to browse far to realize Internet designers are far from affluence of competency. So much yet to do.

We haven't even properly defined competency in new media. We have no benchmarks.

We're still doing our Supper Club as a potluck, and it's more fun that way.