A web design company that talks about info design
>> 12 March 2008
This must be one of the few web design companies I've seen in NZ that talks about information design: Click Suite based in Wellington (no surprise there - Wellington is where most of the best web work is happening in NZ, IMHO).
Click Suite were also responsible for the UI of these two cool web sites by the National Library in Wellington:
- PastPapers - which "contains more than one million pages of digitised New Zealand newspapers and periodicals. The collection covers the years 1840 to 1915 and includes publications from all regions of New Zealand." You can search for keywords across the scanned papers and the keywords are highlighted for you onscreen over the original scan. Nice work.
- Publications New Zealand - which gives public access to information in the huge National Bibliography of things published in New Zealand "from the earliest days of New Zealand publishing through to the present." This site is interesting in using an XML back-end and XSLT to deliver XHTML to the browser. Dat's some clever shit, and it's good to see more web people in NZ know about this stuff.
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3 comments:
Thanks Greg.
I'm an information designer at Click Suite. Good information design is very important for all of our projects. We worked in collaboration with the team at the National Library for both of these projects. They are also well informed about info design. While we use XML and often take charge of an entire project, in this instance they were responsible for the back-end.
Creating the UI and IAs for both of these sites was especially challenging because there was no getting around the deep hierarchical structure of information in each catalogue system. In a lot of instances, users are faced with multiple clicks to reach their goal.
Our aim was to keep the UI (including search interface) as clean and simple as possible to serve both novices, and sophisticated users who spend a lot of time on the site.
Fortunately the content of both sites includes album covers, 19th century regional newspaper mastheads, cartoons, book covers, film posters and manuscript covers which gave our designer some great imagery to work with.
http://publicationsnz.natlib.govt.nz/logicrouter/servlet/LogicRouter?PAGE=object&OUTPUTXSL=object.xsl&pm_RC=NZNB&pm_OI=182865&pm_GT=Y&pm_IAC=Y&api_1=GET_OBJECT_XML&num_result=0&lang=en
Agreed. They're URLs are not the best. Looks like nobody's perfect.
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