Jason Santa Maria
Daniel Burka - Digg/Pownce
Nicholas Felton - feltron.com
Emily Gordon - emdashes.com / printmag.com
Ian Adelman - nymag.com

The “Not the same old story” was a discussion panel moderated by Jason Santa Maria, The direction was good but content sparked interest without providing answers.

The basis of the talk was that if you compare magazine print design with web design and how a magazine story is designed and laid out in a manner that compliments and directs the story portrayed in the content. When the same stories are placed on line they are dumped into the shell of a website that does not change from page to page. At what point did the content become less important online and lose that additional context that is added by the design.

A defence was made that due to the volume of content published on the web and the monetary value applied per page, that it does not allow the same detail applied offline.

This problem is made worse by the open data approach on the web were you can absorb the content through RSS feeds and third party sites. Preventing you from applying any addition direction or emotion to the content. The end decision for consumption lies with the user and this might return to the origin if this additional context is applied. Design has added value.

The core message was that designers portray an emotion and additional context to the content that the user can associate (or disassociate) them selves with. This can be lost online by the use of fixed templates and allowing users to edit and use content as they desire. Although this can remove context it can also allow user to associate themselves to the content through means they are familiar with and adding there own content (metadata). The key is that designers should not become curators and should be able to remain as creators providing art direction per content set as they do at a site level giving the content additional context.