iA’s First Wiki: Das Magazin
After three months of hard work, changing office, shipping around the cliffs of a provider that tells us 10 hours before the launch that we won’t have a working server, restricted server access, database space oddities—we made it!
The new website of DAS MAGAZIN is online. As a wiki. Article pictures and ads are still missing, and we cannot let any users in yet, as it’s not on its permanent server. But everything else works. It’s a cautious start, and soon this website is going to rock the Swiss newsdimension. Here are some pics from the launch night. You can see the morning creeping in.
In the back: Chris, in front: Me. Darth Vader to the left, protecting the source of our energy (yes, these are two kickass Matrix 801 connected to an old fat Accuphase).
DAS MAGAZIN (Engl. “The Magazine”) is a prestigious Swiss publication, comparable to the magazine of the New York Times. It has a weekly distribution of 770,000.
Of course it’s all 100e2r and 95% typography. We’ll be writing more about it as soon as it has pictures on the article pages. It has an ad concept that is really worth talking about. Cheers!
Woah. I see you did go with MediaWiki!
Congratulations. And love the 801s!
Fresh. Beautiful. Text as interface. No chart-junk. Only wish you could do a CSS text implementation of the logo rather than use a jpeg.
Perhaps also a longer search text box, no lines below article headers and more white space padding below the footer.
Congrats! I’m a longtime reader of iAJapan, and I’ve been looking forward to seeing your ideas put into practice. Let us know when it’s up and running.
I’ve been looking forward to see this for some time… Nice work! Congrats.
Can’t wait to see it all finished with images and specially that ad concept you mentioned.
I love how links match each issues cover! I think its a very stylish detail.
Too bad i can’t understand a word though!
Cheers.-
Oliver,
Beautiful work! Congrats! Long days during which I’ve been waiting for some new post, sometimes wondering whether my rss reader was working properly.
Now it’s real. What about the first paper issue? I don’t understand German but it will certainly be worth the expense.
I just stumbled on the congruence between links and H2s inside articles: is it made on purpose?
Congrats guys! Well done on bending mediawiki to your will
Joran: Agree, except for the logo. That’d be a bit too hardcore.
Bernt: It’s up. But the the pics and ads are missing.
Regis: The links are indeed still an issue. The print typography lead us a little off track. We are thinking about coloring links more consistently, even if the beauty and the identity suffer a little.
Bodhi: Without your rodeo skills we couldn’t have done it. This sure is a wild horse… And it needs some more taming.
Nice work, I am really looking forward to see how the wiki thing works for the end user.
One comment on the typography from someone without a designer background:
New paragraphs are marked by an indent, but without a blank line. For my eye, this totally destroys the harmony of a text. Just look at the article “Königin der Fensterbank”. A few pages down there are a few single lines because it is a dialogue. The eye constantly has to jump from indent to the beginning of the line, and back, newer consistent. There is no clear alignment along the left side, making the text very difficult to read.
I believe indents like this, especially for a newspaper on screen, are very annoying and not very “100% readable”. Marking new paragraphs with spare lines is more natural, i believe…
Just my 2 cents…
I agree with everyone else - nice work indeed and I look forward to seeing how the wikinews concept works out.
And in keeping with the other comments, I have a suggestion myself (which I’m sure you’ve considered but haven’t got round to yet): sort out those ugly URLs!
Get a bit of mod_rewrite on the go and get:
http://www.dasmagazin.ch/
to display the same content as:
http://www.dasmagazin.ch/index.php?title=Main_Page
And, for example, get:
http://www.dasmagazin.ch/NachtderKollision/
to display the same as:
http://www.dasmagazin.ch/index.php?title=NachtderKollision
And so on …
Well done again!
Hmmm …. the last two URLs in my comment had underscores in all the right places that are now missing in the published version.
Something to look out for, Oliver?
Thanks Jon, nice URLs are planned, but right now our hands are tied because we have a server that doesn’t allow nice URLs. As it does not allow uploading pictures automatically. The server company is trying to install a PHP XML module for the last 5 days andhas not managed to do so yet. They claim that for such work one needs to reserve “ressources” weeks ahead…
San, I know what you mean. My question is: Do you speak German? If you get the content, the indent actually makes sense. For interviews we have this—rather perculiar—regulation, to use underline for questions. This raised some concerns as well (looks like a link).
As our links are somewhat inconsistent (sometimes Bold, sometimes underlined, sometimes colored), people without German skills are slightly irritated. Also that is pretty much exactly how the magazine looks; people know and like it and it is certainly designed by some of the best designers in Switzerland.
Also, the stats though denote no such problems. The site is humming and the pageviews per user are up to 12.
I do speak German, and I know that there is a logical reason for it. I just dont like the way the indents destroy the flow of the text…
Look at this part
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/209/499264974_150ed4a79e.jpg?v=0
The way “Jahr” and “Markt” stick out really stings in the eye.
Other things that seem to be out of order (although they may be features, not bugs):
The introduction to every article is HUGE. It seems as if it is bigger that the headline itself…
Sometimes the “Inhaltsverzeichnis” for an article is placed several pages down (where the first section begins).
The interview regulations are really bad. It either looks like a link or like a badly formatted header for a paragraph, especially if the answers are long… But I guess there is nothing you can do about it. Although I have noted that sometimes the formatting is just plain wrong (Q and A mixed up), like here:
http://www.dasmagazin.ch/index.php?title=DerRetterdes_Genitivs
There are many more things, but most are obviously still under construction, so there is no need to name it here.
I am a great admirer of your work, the thought you put into it and the way you express it. Keep up the good work…
As noted before, valuable underscores were deleted from my previous answer. Of course it is
DerRetterdes_Genitivs
On the same time this reveals a minor flaw of the system: There are no 404 messages yet…
What about indents with a spacer line above?
San, you might be onto something there with the indent. I am not totally convinced. I think it’s a mere problem of formatting interviews within the article correctly. Normal textblocks look good with the indent. The art director didn’t want the (for online text) usual distance between the paragraphs, so we tried the indent, and I actually still kind of like it. Maybe it’s too much though. Let me look into that some more and discuss it with the art director.
Mixed up Q&A: The messed up example you pointed out is just a formatting mistake. Nothing tragic there.
I totally like the big introfont though. From the screenshot I guess you use PC Firefox. Kind of true that the big Text doesn’t look too good for you guys as the antialiasing sucks on PCs. Maybe we use a different Intro for PC boys…
Joran: Indents with spacer: Can’t see that happening.
Joran: I think that using CSS to display the logotype would be a bad idea. A logotype should not be displayed differently just because the user doesn’t have the right font installed.
Gefaellt mir sehr was Du da machst Oliver. Es wird Zeit, dass der Schweizer Webmedienlandschaft mal einer ein paar Wuerste auf den Kasernenplatz pfeffert.
Hey Leisibach, das war eine verschimmelte Salami aus dem Abfalleimer, damals, nicht irgendeine Wurst. Der Kommandant hat die Salami dann zu Propagandazwecken undnoganzwundabaafrisch genannt, in der Hoffnung, er wuerde damit eine Denunziazion des Salamiwerfers erreichen.
The indent issue may just be that it doesn’t look “natural”, imho. After all, our eyes go from left to right and the indent just follow that direction, acting as stop points, isn’t it?
Why not follow the principles explained in
http://webtypography.net/RhythmandProportion/BlocksandParagraphs/2.3.2/
that is, describe a square with the indent:
p + p { text-indent: 1.5em; /* = line-height */ }
What I noticed is that articles are very long and it looks really dense as is, difficult to digest ’cause the flow of text just never stops. Don’t you think it’s bad for online reading? I would suggest to create a balance between indents (normal flow of texts) and another type of paragraph indication, say micro whitespace or ornaments, which have a higher visual impact and act as some sort of pause for the eye.
Mr Boulton gives interesting advices in http://www.alistapart.com/articles/whitespace/
Regis,
I am aware of both articles, and actually the indent does form more or less a square. Excellent article by Mr Boulton by the way.
We shouldn’t get overly exited about the indent. Indenting text is not some new invention. It’s a printing standard very useful for reading and not unnatural or even “destroying the harmony of a text”… The problems appear because of the short paragraphs, which are, as a matter of fact, unnatural and produce an ugly “Textbild” (text image).
Nevertheless I am happy to learn more about how you all perceive things…
We’ve progressed a lot over the past few days, but we still have a long list of issues to go through. Building this WYSIWYG is driving us nuts. There are problems on and on popping up with all the different kinds of wikipages, browsers platforms…
Oh, I see you have started to implement pictures and comments. It looks very promising. I even got used to the indent, with long paragraphs it is quite ok…
By the way, since you linked to dasmagazin.ch I have read almost every article on the site. Its really a great magazine…
San,
If you want an account I’d be happy to create one for you…
Well, I have already followed the instructions on the site and have sent a mail to dasmagazin.ch, but since I have not received an answer yet I guess this part is still under construction.
So I would really apprechiate an account, I hope I have something intelligent to say to the articles of the next edition…
san benshu