Designing The News

UPDATE: This post has been updated on 05 April 2008. The original contents of this post can be found in this text file.

This visual has been modified from its original version. The background has been changed (taken from a very light grey to a very dark grey/black) to be consistent with the overall style. Illustrations have been tweaked to appear better on the darker background. Nothing else has been changed.

Today’s visual lists all of the headlines to appear in The Guardian for February 19th 2008, and sized them according to their word count for each article. Some of the more important words, words that describe particular actions, or names of people or places have been illustrated in order to more effectively communicate the headline. (Although the plain one is really really nice too!)

What I wanted to show was just how many stories are in The Guardian newspaper, and highlight some of the more meaningful words. There are alot, averaging at around 60 stories a day, plus change on the weekend edition.

The Series

This is one day in a series that takes the news from one week of the Guardian newspaper, and visually represents it as a series of static visualisations. You may also be interested in:

• Monday - A typographic and layout based piece previewing the contents of the paper as ingredients.
• Tuesday - A list of headlines contained in the paper illustrated with references to the article or subject.
• Wednesday - A polar graph inspired layout mapping the stories and categories on colour coded concentric circles.
• Thursday - A content map showing the relationships between information inside of a circular container.
• Friday - A text heavy piece highlighting the sheer amount of information contained within in the paper.
• Saturday - A grid based typographic piece, showing patterns and author relationships through the paper.