Cape Town Conference: Is the web inspiring print front pages?

“As technology keeps developing, in the last couple of years the industry has witnessed the evolution into a more image-driven web design,” Trivino said.

Readability and usability always come first on to the web. Aiming for a better functionality, web designers explore different reading rhythms that collaterally are modeling new habits in newspapers’ audiences.

On the web, new readers are accustomed to another informational architecture — hundreds of points of entry per page. And they are also very used to a vertical scroll-telling. Even though they essentially are video/image readers that will probably stay much longer watching a story than reading it, their impact is nevertheless felt on print.

The influence of the web on print goes beyond the detail as there is a bidirectional flow, there exist a permanent transfer of items and resources from the Internet to newspapers by osmosis, said Trivino.

The digital age has inaugurated a world of effects from the internet to newspapers such as gradient, reflections, highlights or transparencies that newspapers designers now emulate.

Trivino said internet aesthetic finds its best echo in quality free newspapers, especially those who target the youngest audiences — some even take their names from the web or from the digital vocabulary (24hrs, Link, Quick).

However, he said that there will always be a physical gap between newspapers design and new media design because the platform determines the message.

“But traditional media would modernize their audiences by understanding and speaking more fluently this new grammar,” he said.