Interview with the Guardian iPad app designer

Neiman Lab has an interview with John-Henry Barac, an art director and designer for the printed edition of The Guardian newspaper, who designed The Guardian’s first iPhone app.

In designing newspapers, you’re always thinking about how to offer the reader different ways into a story — so there’s the headline, there’s the standfirst and the rest of it, but there’s also other call-outs and boxes and other objects which allow the user multiple ways to access the story. And if those are used carefully and coherently, they help to build greater depth of the story that you’re trying to tell.

I think the iPad begins to offer that level of complexity. It offers the reader many different ways to kind of grab hold of part of the story that might interest them, whether it’s a small snippet with a link or another way to dig into a longer article.