The 15th annual Webby award winners have been announced and there’s some fantastic sites amongst them. If you’re feeling short of inspiration, just click on a few of these winning sites to see what’s happening out there. There’s 70 categories, including news and magazines, so there’s bound to be something to interest you.
Impressed by the Animoto site, which produces videos from uploaded images or clips. It’s free to produce videos of up to 30 seconds. There’s plenty of background music to choose from, as bands can submit in order to promote their work, or you can upload your own audio.
I produced these two using jpgs of The Arcade and Rouge magazines, produced by the third year BA Journalism and MA Magazine Journalism students.
Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.
Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.
Parents of teenagers can get all the help they need (including a translation service) from Hera magazine and website, produced by the BA Journalism third years.
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The Information is Beautiful infographics site is an inspiration to anyone who is trying to combine great journalism with great design. Many of his visualisations are stunning, but I particularly love the Billion Dollar-o-gram, born out of frustration with articles that talk about “this many billions” and “that many billions”. It suggests comparisons but makes it easy to create your own comparisons. Who knew the world’s foreign aid budget was worth almost exactly the same as the world’s internet porn industry? Or that “gifts to doctors in the US” cost almost as much as the French bank bailout?
Elsewhere, see how big cocaine was in the nineteenth century using Google’s n-gram viewer, or marvel at Wikipedia’s lamest edit wars.
Aimed at body modification artists, the Inkorporate site has been built by BA Journalism students to accompany their B2B magazine.
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Some images have been removed for copyright reasons.
New BA Journalism magazine website Outbound is now live. It’s a B2B aimed at outdoor activity centre staff.
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Gym Class magazine (for the guy chosen last) has created a nice little video using the graphics and images from their magazine. It makes a great teaser.
esquire logo
Esquire covers a diverse range of topics from music to politics, health to fashion, lifestyle tips to inspiring features Esquire’s heritage of top-class writing and quality journalism, combined with A-list celebrity coverage and great photography gives the readers an informing and entertaining package every month. The magazine is for a more sophisticated reader, and the brand is able to carry on this sophisticated package on into its website. The colour scheme and layout mirror the print version, the website is split into the same sections as the magazine, the type face is extended throughout the website and the Esquire logo is used where ever and when ever possible, and much of the editorial content is unique and supplements the magazine.
The website superbly reflects Esquires Brand Values
esquire online
In my opinion the BBC News website is the best source for news on the web. Even great news sites such as The Guardian and The Times (once you delve behind its paywall) can’t keep up with the resources, history and excellence of the world’s largest broadcaster.
BBC News App
So I was very happy to find the BBC’s news app is similarly brilliant. It’s free – as you would except from a national broadcaster – and has an elegant UI that uses scrollable columns and rows in a way similar to the Pulse RSS reader and a “drag down to refresh” feature that has become almost standardised after it was first used in the brilliant Tweetie (now Twitter for iPhone).
Whilst the Guardian remains the most feature complete news app on iTunes, the simplicity and elegance of this lightweight BBC app makes it the best for quickly reading headline news and features.
