
The Year Ahead 2016 - callumlocke
http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/year-ahead-2016/
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javajosh
I really like the look of this! Why all the negativity? Just because Bloomberg
did it? The simple truth is that positioned text (and, in this case,
discretely positioned fixed width text) is a wonderful format for conveying
information. The combination of scroll-advance, the way contrast is used to
focus - I say, really cool looking.

My only criticism was the boy in the moon animation to the left of the company
list. That was distracting and made the UI feel chaotic. I also don't like the
(full color) banner ads - they could have at least got one of their sponsors
to do an ASCII art version of their ads!

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baconner
It was totally charming and i scrolled through it with a smile. But you know
what - didn't really read it, it's pretty hard to read actually. Not sure
that's what you want to be going for as a news organization.

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1wheel
50 charts and tables is a lot to consume on a webpage no matter how you slice
it.

The original magazine presentation - 6 full page spreads with 8 or 9 charts
each - is way more readable. The higher information density of paper lets you
glance at 9 companies at once and spend more time with what looks interesting.
We tried to preserve some of the serendipity online with the short preview
sentences on the left column, but the linear scroll through the charts takes
away from that and makes it feel a little too chore like.

Sometimes translating to digital invites amazing improvements through
interactivity (see what is code), but here we had a tight deadline and too
many charts to redo them all in an interesting way w/ d3 so the digital focus
was much more on the design side.

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jamesrom
Another great piece of content made completely unreadable by Bloomberg.

Ever since Joshua Topolsky joined Bloomberg, this novelty-over-form style is
everywhere.

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skybrian
It worked well (and got lots of traffic) the first time they did it. I think
they learned the wrong lesson.

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pcunite
Did the offices at Bloomberg suffer from an electromagnetic pulse explosion?
The 5¼ floppies were safe in an underground bunker?

:-)

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joezydeco
Holy BBS flashback, Batman....

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stonogo
I think you'd find not many BBSes required ~2.5MB of transfer to display a
handful of extremely short articles.

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1wheel
Not including ads, the page is 1.1 MB w/ 800KB of chart images and 100KB of
css that was mistakenly included (whoops).

We did discuss just publishing a .txt or .nfo file instead, but some of the
charts required a bit of ASCII cheating and being able to adjust font size &
weight of labels really made them a lot more readable.

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mbilker
There are still BBS's around. You just need to look. There are some BBS art on
sixteencolors and some of the art packs have addresses for some BBS systems.

