Biz book, news design share a thread

I'm reading a business book. And I just got back from a newspaper design competition. The two seem related in a way I'll try to explain.

The book, The Innovator's Solution by Clayton Christensen, I borrowed from my boss (given that my job should be focused on innovation, he had motive to lend it). If you're familiar with Christensen's predecessor tome, The Innovator's Dilemma, you know it was one of the rally towels of the so-called "New Economy" back in the late '90s.

Both books describe the concept of "disruptive innovation." In a disruption, the innovating enterprise develops products that are not as good as leading-edge competitors, but become good enough at lower cost to satisfy gradually increasing shares of the market. As the innovator's products improve, the leading-edge competitor's products also improve, but market share gradually shifts to the "good-enough" products because of their better price-to-performance ratios.

Disruption examples from Christensen:

• Steel minimills that started by taking the low-end business the big mills didn't want. The minimills gradually improved their quality enough to move into more profitable, sophisticated steel markets. They disrupted the businesses of large, integrated mills from the bottom up.
• Sony's disruption of the market for vacuum-tube radios with lower-quality (at the time) transistor models. The big tube radios from RCA and others had better sound, but youngsters could carry the little transistor boxes and hear the music their parents wouldn't let them play on the old consoles. Transistor models gradually got better, and stores stopped carrying parts for tube models.

I believe a disruption -- perhaps more subtle than a steel mill or a Sony -- is in progress in the field of news design.

The competition I just attended solidified this theory.

This event, the Best of Newspaper Design, is an annual shindig of the Society for News Design and S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. Design judges from around the world descend on Syracuse, N.Y., for a long weekend to choose the best in categories from news page designs to illustration portfolios.

I attended not as an entrant or a judge, but an observer. I reported on the competition judging all weekend for the SND Web site (you can still see the daily reports there). Here's what I observed:

Even mediocre entries demonstrated that newspaper designers, in general, "get" legibility and readability in their typeface choices. After nine years working on Web sites, I remain intensely jealous of the many fine options and much higher fidelity inherent in print typography.

(I am always amazed, though, to see grossly overused "Web fonts" show up as display type on a printed page. Yet I did on several entries this year. If I were to return exclusively to print design, unlikely as that is, one thing's certain: I'd never again use Verdana, Georgia or Trebuchet!)

You also have to admire the state of the art in information graphics. Ever more nuanced tools in programs such as Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, Macromedia Freehand and you-name-it among 3D applications combine to make detailed, photorealistic depictions the new standard. And newspaper graphic artists got more chances to show off their visual storytelling skills in 2003, given the emphasis on a war and major disaster stories.

Newspaper-based Web sites should benefit from the increasing richness of news graphics; after all, many of those sites start from print-produced information graphics to create their most powerful multimedia packages.

That same emphasis on super-size stories, though, made certain news categories very tough places to stand out. When your paper's "Saddam captured" page is on a table next to 100 other "Saddam captured" pages, all with that same picture of a scruffy, apparently disoriented former dictator ... well, I don't know how judges could keep from a little disorientation of their own.

The problem's worse in non-news design categories: features, food, fashion, entertainment. A newspaper page is a big palette, which should make it fertile ground for illustrations and poster-style designs.

Unfortunately, the relative volume of features section fronts -- which, remember, typically print behind one or more news sections -- still seems set to "scream" louder than the sections that wrap it.

With fewer formulas and constraints, designers routinely experiment on feature covers. In fact, they've done it so much and for so long now that even the most dramatic concepts struggle to stand out. In fact, at least one judge I talked to felt the rapid-fire review of so many entries (more than 13,600) put subtlety and attention to detail at a clear disadvantage.

In the two years straight that I've observed this competition, I've had that same feeling. So here's the disruption theory:

Print design, both as a creative discipline and a craft intended to improve communications, is bouncing against the innovation ceiling.

The best are getting better but slowly, and their innovations are so rarified they approach a point of diminishing return. Average and even below-average print designs are at least competent. I said it last year and it's still true: publications that have truly bad designs do so by choice, because resources to execute decent design work in print are cheap and plentiful.

Upper-tier print designers strive valiantly for new heights of creative expression, though the attempt is far more important to the designers themselves than to their audiences. A reader who just wants to know the score of yesterday's game doesn't care that the main features illustration took 25 hours of an artist's time, or that the text flowed around it in a clever way.

Those same designers don't like to spend time helping make the sports box scores easier to find or read. The high-end design is "too good" for our sports fan. But the low-end work is more bother than benefit for the newspaper designer.

Enter Internet design. It is nowhere near as refined, ambitious or mature as print design. In many significant cases it remains driven by ugly but practical data architecture, not compelling visual presentation.

But practitioners in online customer experience (a discipline that combines design with various audience feedback and measurement techniques) definitely will take the time to get our sports fan to his scores.

And those scores will be more carefully presented, easier to find and easier to read than in a newspaper. So will stock quotes, birth announcements, classified advertising and entertainment guide listings.

If you believe more people turn to newspapers for dramatic design work than for the data in those examples, whoa, Nelly. Just watch as papers continue to scale back on the types of data they provide (think stock tables), or lose it even if they want to keep it (think classified ads).

That stuff's going online, and online designers work a lot harder to make sure it's usable than their print counterparts. No one can explain to me logically why a features page with one large, colorful thematic illustration, and maybe the first few paragraphs of three stories, is better than a features page full of well-organized lifestyle "data points" people can use to better themselves.

But I can explain to you why people would go to WebMD for health information, or Monster.com for job postings, or eBay to sell merchandise, rather than their local newspapers. It's data-driven design. It's not pretty, but it's good enough because it solves their problems as well or better than print.

And that's classic disruption, in the Christensen definition. While the high-end enterprises keep trying to pierce the ceiling, the low end becomes good enough to capture markets -- first the ones the high end doesn't want to keep, then the ones the high end can't afford to lose.