By Marko Dugonjić CHAPTER 9working with editors and art Directors
In recent years we have witnessed a rise in the use of Web art direction.
Naturally, it first started on the personal blogs of Web designers, but now
many online magazines have a person onboard who double-checks how
content looks and if there are any orphans or widows left, whether they
role is art direction, proofreading or anything else. You’ll think, “Why
should I care? It’s the Web!” I know, I know — we have to embrace the
fluidity of the Web. But fixing a widowed word at the end of a paragraph is
easily done either manually or with a preprocessor^8 , by entering a simple
or between the two last words, so there’s really no excuse for
not doing so. In editorial environments the chief editor and the art director
work together to rephrase, break and reshuffle content in order to facilitate
readability^9. The same process can be applied to every website that goes
out. After all, messages need to be edited — both in content and in form —
so that they reach the receiver.
Work more closely with content creators and CMS developers to en-
sure proper text markup is applied, and provide guidelines for establishing
rhythm and balance, especially if there are different content types — such
as text, photos, videos, graphs or tables — mixed and matched together.
We can go further and design bulletproof templates for whatever
markup is generated by the CMS; for example, restrict floated images,
ignore font styles and custom bullets. Help develop a CMS that supports
content objects that, besides supporting an extensive metadata scheme,
also support content sequencing and hierarchy^10.
If this isn’t possible, then, at the very least, extend the original content
object with specialized sub-objects, a feature now available for some years
in a few robust CMSes, for instance in eZ Publish^11.
8 http://smashed.by/widont
9 I love Jason Santa Maria’s definition of readability: “Do I want to read it?”, http://vimeo.com/34178417
10 Gerry Leonidas, The Newest New Typography”, http://player.vimeo.com/video/73444208
11 http://ez.no