Stephen Gates - Interactive Creative Director - Web Design, Online Advertising, Digital Marketing Blog

May 18, 2008

MSNBC Spectra Visual Newsreader

Last year about this time MSNBC launched their NewsBreaker site and interactive movie theater experience. It was an interesting exercise is news visualization and they have followed it up with a new project this year called the MSNBC Spectra Visual Newsreader. This new site continues the work in news visualization but this time it uses Papervision 3D to display news headlines as a colorful, graphic whirlwind. You choose the news categories that interest you and they make up the whirlwind which updates in real time with the latest stories. You can save the stories that interest you the most to the Spectra's NewsCollector to read later. I am still waiting to see if there are plans for an interactive installation like with Newsbreak but nothing so far.

Labels: Design and user experience, Exceptional Flash, Site review, Unique interface design

1 Comments:

megH said...: i stumbled upon this site yesterday and i have to say i was not impressed. its just a good example of flair over function. i found the swirling menu hard to navigate not because i didn't know how to use it but because when i would click on the thumbnail of the story i wanted to view a different one would come up. Also i think that the use of a slider to navigate thumbnails was frustrating. I did not know that they used papervision 3d to create this site and i applaud the experiment but if they are looking for an inventive way of presenting news they should go back to the drawing board.; 3:43 PM

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I'm Stephen Gates and I’ve been in the advertising business almost my whole life. I am a designer and second generation creative director and an hour from now I will probably be locked away in my studio slowly going blind working on a new design or this blog. That has to be love or insanity – since it is advertising it is probably a bit of both.

This blog is an extension of my personal portfolio site and is a collection of rants, resources, observations and advice about Web sites, usability design, technology, the advertising industry and who knows what else that are just too well done, funny or weird not share. It takes a village so let me know what you think.