Magzalez’s eyes on media

Last night I collaborated with The Alligator managing editor for online media, Ken Schwencke, a sweet and to-the-point infographic about proposed bus route changes around Gainesville.

I wrote the action script and made the design. Ken found the maps on the Gainesville Regional Transit System’s Web site. We copied some Google maps, and Ken overlayed the bus routes with the hoity toity Photoshop Pen tool — the most difficult part of the night.

I was glad I didn’t have a whole heap of trouble catching up on my Flash. It is really pretty intuitive once you’ve done it before. That was the first Flash I’d done since I made a small package for class a couple of months ago. Before then it had been more than a year.

Although this story and idea were sprung up on me, I commend Ken for thinking out of the box for different ways to present information on The Alligator’s Web site. The site’s multimedia section is growing as Ken has somehow motivated reporters to shoot video. Alligator photographer Charles Roop — great photographer — shot a video about a roller derby for today’s online edition as well. I’d be lying if I said I’d seen it already, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t check it out!

More on what I think about this later, but check out how cool this interactive piece about Ana Ivanovic’s serve by The New York Times. It helps that Ivanovic is a cutie.

• Power in Motion – New York Times – May 26, 2008

Yesterday was the start of the Sony Ericsson Open in my native town of Miami. It is considered the fifth most important tournament of the year, behind only the four grand slams.

The Miami Herald pulled through in creating a nice multimedia piece for the event, which attracts residents, tourists and celebrities alike.

First, check out the 2008 Sony Ericsson Open Fan Guide for yourself.

And now for my analysis:

The Good: 

• Making the package to begin with was a great idea. This tennis tournament is the sort of thing you get out of the ordinary readers flocking to your Web site for. If they see an interesting, helpful multimedia piece. That is going to keep them coming back.
• The information, including the map of the area, directions, what to and not to bring, etc.
• The overall presentation looks nice, sleek and interesting.
• Players to watch is a good idea for a section. Put some names out there that people are going to recognize or remember.
• The history of the event is crucial in giving context. This is easily my favorite section.
• Kudos on the right-side navigation. I love it.

The Bad:

• Whenever you click on a section, you have to exit out of it to get back to the main navigation. This is no good. People like to skip around, and you’re adding unnecessary steps for them with this design.
• The map in the “directions” section looks great. The way you put in the information works well. But I was very disappointed to be redirected to Google maps after I input my information. I know this could have been done differently and more effectively.
• The “Tennis 101″ section is no good. There is too much information in this topic, and as it is, it is underdeveloped here. I also don’t think it makes to include it. For the most part, people who will be looking at this, in my opinion, are those that are already interested in tennis, and if they are not tennis fans already, they are not going to go to a “fan guide” for an event to learn about the sport. This section was just plain silly.
• On the “Site map” page, I am not sure what the functionality of having the “Click here to use your mouse…” sign is. This looks weird and unprofessional, not to mention the whole “click here” faux pas.
• The photography seems to be uncredited, though I may have overlooked it.

The Ugly:

• Way more work could have been put into each players’ action shots. These photos just look poorly Photoshopped.
• The “Back to main” buttons don’t have enough of a contrast.
• I thought the overlay could have been a darker color. It would have looked nicer and the visibility would have been better.

Overall, it’s well done. There are some strange design choices, and the information could have been edited down. But it looks great and works well. I’m glad they took the initiative in doing this. Now if they could just put together some Soundslides instead of ugly photo galleries. Video would be nice too, but The Herald needs a lot of help in that department. You know, I could help you!

Yay tennis!

I’ll look later to see if The South Florida Sun-Sentinel is doing anything.

I started this project a long time ago. But I finally finished redesigning my portfolio. The final touch was putting up a page with some of my Web content, which includes some of my Flash and CSS projects.

There are still a few things I’d like to do, but they are minimal:

• Make a lightbox for my photojournalism page, though I do like the absolutely positioned layout I made for my favorite photos.
• Put in a video page. For now, all my videos are on YouTube.
• Move my page over from the University of Florida Web servers to a new Web host along with a new domain name. Right now using UF hosting I have only 20 mb of space and an unreliable server.
• And of course, I will eventually put this blog on there.

What do you think?

Well, it’s good to back from vacation. Two 16-hour drives and a bout with food poisoning later, I’m glad to be getting back to my school/work routine.

Tomorrow I will start what is probably my second-to-last semester at the University of Florida. I will also be returning to my job with the university Web administration office.

I will be taking five classes:

1. Intro to Public Speaking
2. Tennis 2
3. The Literature of Jorge Amado (Brazil) and Bahia in Translation
4. Law of Mass Communication
5. Applied Interactive Newspapers

Applied Interactive Newspapers is what the University of Florida’s College of Journalism and Communications calls a “capstone” course. It is the most advanced online-journalism class offered at the school. The course is taught by Prof. David Carlson and Dave Stanton.

The class is both a new chance to learn as well as a chance to get some hands-on experience in the college’s Interactive Media Lab. Under Carlson and Stanton’s watch and with support from The Gainesville Sun, my peers and I will produce a Gainesville Sun publication, Newszine, described as a “dynamic news publication intended to represent typical systems used in newsrooms throughout the world.”

The Newszine Web site features full-length stories as well as multimedia ranging from videos, video podcasts, slideshows and more.

Aside from the publication, there are a couple of other interesting things scheduled. We will be going over the principles of XML, RSS, PHP, ASP, MySQL and others. There will be individual projects, group projects, video projects and weekly quizzes to keep us sharp on our knowledge of the AP Stylebook.

It is going to be an interesting semester with plenty of work and learning to do. Combining everything I learn from my job and my Applied Interactive Newspapers class, I hope to be ready for a job with a publication’s online team by the year’s end.