Open-Node.net

Being Avid Readers, we devour magazines from start to finish. For us, nothing compliments a twice daily subway ride better than a new magazine: fresh with news, stories and analyses you??™ve yet to read. So accustomed to this routine are we that a subway ride without a magazine seems empty, annoying and interminably long.

Magazines have, through their years of trial, error and experience, developed layouts that are both easy to read and enticing. We find it a shame that these same magazines??™ web companions rarely evoke the same feeling.

The most obvious obstacle might be the text-flow from one column to the next. Current CSS specifications and browsers do not provide an automatic solution for this staple of print publishing. However, with some clever character counting, and a few minutes of extra (manual) manipulation, multi-column text layouts can work.

We??™ve felt so for awhile, and early this past summer put together an Economist-inspired mock-up. The cobwebs in our code haven??™t been dusted away, so pardon the gratuitous absolute positioning and the extra div here and there. Despite this ???impurity???, we still think it stands as a viable solution.

Update: A nigh-perfect rebuttal from Michael Barrett at Abouthalf. As Mr. Barrett presumes, we too often lament the disparity between print and Web media. This should not however cause us to impose print standards in ways that limit this different medium. We humbly concede.

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September 27th 2004 Posted to   Design