The Times Emulates Print on the Web

Microsoft and The New York Times have unveiled software that preserves the print edition's design online.

The Web has fostered an explosion of new ideas about information design -- the art of arranging text, graphics, and data to make reading more pleasurable or advertising more diverting. Not all of these ideas have been good ones, as anyone who has been assaulted by blinking pop-up ads knows.

The New York Times' coverage of its new online application for reading articles, called Times Reader, displayed in the application. (Courtesy of Nick Thuesen, Binary Devign.)

But the newest feature of Microsoft's next-generation Vista operating system, due in 2007, attempts to clean up the Web, restoring some of the best principles of graphic design from the pre-Internet era. On April 28 Microsoft and The New York Times Company unveiled a prototype of the Times Reader, a browser-like program that gives New York Times designers the ability to more closely reproduce the newspaper's distinctive look and feel on a computer screen, regardless of the screen's size or format.

The software takes advantage of WinFX, a completely new system for rendering user-interface graphics that Microsoft is developing for Vista. It's distinct from the Times' recently redesigned website, but the Reader nevertheless has many of the features of a Web browser, including hyperlinks, navigation buttons, and a search function. It's also designed to stockpile content for offline reading and to make it easy to annotate, e-mail, or blog about the stories displayed.

[Click here for images from the Times Reader.]

"We are trying to make a product, a news experience, that more fully engages our readers, that allows them to want to spend more time with us," said New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. at last week's conference of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, where the announcement was made. "We must be platform agnostic....We must follow readers where they want to be."

The design of a newspaper is an indelible part of its identity, and while the New York Times, long known as "the Gray Lady," added color in 1997, its print edition is still distinguished by a somber, restrained design and dignified serif typeface for text (Imperial), which are perhaps the most recognizable in the newspaper industry. And the Times' website has sought to mimic that flavor, most recently with a redesign that uses serif fonts, and which is intended to take advantage of larger computer monitors. But with the advent of the Times Reader, the paper's online version will bear a much greater resemblance to its print product.

And, indeed, print designers argue that the old-fashioned print newspaper boasts one of our culture's most elegant and highly evolved user interfaces. A newspaper's narrow columns, for example, make it easy to scan an entire story. Text is usually placed on a consistent "grid" that guides the eye horizontally and vertically. And varying type sizes, along with the placement of stories, headlines, and graphics, convey each story's relative importance.

The Times Reader recreates those aids to understanding using Microsoft's new Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and other WinFX tools intended to make Vista visually richer than Windows XP. One of WPF's key features is the ability to make documents "reflow" and auto-hyphenate, so that multi-column formats are retained even when a user resizes the Reader window. "Basically, designers from the print world are able to regain the control over their content they lost when content started to gravitate to the Web," writes Nick Thuesen, a Microsoft programmer who publishes a personal blog about his work on WPF.