Esquire cover proves blinking text is still sophomoric, tacky and unreadable
A buddy of mine recently wrote a post about Esquire’s 75th anniversary cover, contemplating what it means for the future of print media. It’s funny, because I don’t necessarily think it signals the end of print media, not any more than Amazon Kindle.
What it does demonstrate, though, are the rookie mistakes of a new medium. Some of which are mistakes any hack would have learned from web designers.
What’s up with the blinking headlines?
The 21st Century begins… wait for it… now. Couldn’t read the headline because it briefly disappeared from the page. Jakob Nielson has condemned blinking text as one of the worst mistakes in web design, some web browsers actually refused to support it in the past, and its inventor is rumored to have called it “the worst thing [he] ever did to the Internet.”
My problems with the Esquire cover go beyond blinking text. They’ve basically used it to create short, infinitely repeating animations. I know I’ve always felt that sort of thing was tacky, but I wonder how many other people feel the same way whenever I look at some people’s Myspace pages.
But the question remains: is this the wave of the future? Is traditional print media on the verge of extinction?
The act of reading has not fundamentally changed
From a production standpoint, “traditional print media” died years ago, with the introduction of desktop publishing programs like Adobe PageMaker. Most people don’t manually set type anymore. And yet, despite the radical change, the impression of a “traditional print media” is still there.
The fact of the matter is, technology will always change, but the act of reading probably won’t. We process text, one block at a time. Granted, the size of that block changes from time to time – maybe we’re reading a novel, with thick blocks of rich prose, or maybe we’re reading short blocks, condensed like haiku, in our cell phone text messages. The technology does change what we read, but the act of reading itself is unaffected, because it is universal and timeless.
The future looks less like Esquire, more like Kindle
Some look at the Esquire cover and speculate if this is where print media is going. I’d argue that if it goes anywhere, Amazon’s Kindle is arguably the first step, not the ?Esquire? cover. Using basically the same technology, Kindle solves the fundamental problems of trying to use E Ink in a magazine: Kindle’s battery is rechargable, and you’re not going to either throw it in the trash or store it in a stack of dusty magazines when you’re done reading it.
Furthermore, Kindle has advantages over laptops and computer monitors (for now), namely the ability to render crisp, clear typography.
Will magazines and newspapers as we know them now die out? Perhaps. But the public will always desire information, and despite half a century of competition from television, the written word is alive and well. As long as it stays that way, there will always be a market for publications that bring the written word to the public.