MultimediaCommProf

I’ve just spent some quality minutes with one of the best Web portfolios by a student journalist I’ve ever come across. The young woman’s name is Lauren Rabaino, and she’s a sophomore at Cal Polytechnical in San Luis Obispo, Calif.

Everything about Ms. Rabaino’s Web site says connected! The right-side content area links to all the social services that she participates in. It’s an impressive list, and and she appears to maintain a professional, active presence in the ones I checked (Twitter and WiredJournalists).

There’s so much to like about this site. Ms. Rabaino illustrates a number things I’m encouraging our majors to do with their portfolios. First, the design immediately communicates a distinctive identity. The type, the color scheme, the graphic of converging diagonals all shout edgy, youthful energy—which Ms. Rabaino must have in abundance to keep up with all that she’s attempting to do. I’ve also advised my students to make it immediately clear who they are and what they do, which this home page does in the branding area. Ms. Rabaino also blogs regularly about the leading edge of journalism and the current state of the industry. I’m telling our majors there’s no more convincing way to demonstrate to a prospective employer that they will make innovative, professional staff members than to start a blog about what they’re learning and reading.

A few areas in the site need attention—the display of news stories is still basic and inconsistent with the rest of site and a number of the audio files in the broadcast area aren’t playing—but both the presentation and the work presented represent Ms. Rabaino as an exceptionally talented young woman. Who could resist wanting to hire her after spending even five minutes with this portfolio?

The University of Missouri announced its Picture of the Year International award winners, and the work included in the Documentary Project of the Year offers some good examples of outstanding interface design.

The Roanoke Times took away the top prize with its feature, “Age of Uncertainty,” an extensive collection of galleries, video, audio, and interactive resources that document the rapidly growing population of aging adults in Virginia.

The package’s interface is pretty traditional, with a top banner that remains at the top of every page and a horizontal dropdown navigation bar. The dropdowns presented some problems as I used them in Firefox 3.0: they often would flicker and disappear before I could select the link I wanted. The main content of the home page is a Flash show that alternates animated text with brief audio snippets representing the various viewpoints about caring for the elderly that are covered in the story. I usually don’t care for extended Flash intros, but this one is exceedingly well done and provides a clear overview of the problems and issues treated in the various features and stories. One annoyance is that the Flash show restarts every time you return to the home page. Interesting and moving the first time you hear it, the interview that begins the introduction quickly becomes an irritant and sends one looking for switch to turn the audio off.

In putting Adrielle’s Black History Month package together last week, we struggled some with the Flash audio player. Probably for that reason, I found interesting Roanoke’s use of Soundslides essentially as an audio player. Users choose the audio story they wish to hear by clicking a thumbnail of the speaker. This loads Soundslides. A full-size portrait of the speaker appears for the duration of the audio story. It allows users to really study the face that goes with the voice they are listening to. Of course this puts a premium on outstanding portraits.

While not outstanding, the interface for “Age of Uncertainty” is satisfying and user-friendly as far as design goes, even if the dropdown menu didn’t work smoothly.

I’m going to end this post here, but I want to examine a few other interfaces from the POYi winners. Next up will be “Where Children Find Hope,” from The Detroit Free Press.