We love it.

It is responsive and offers an immersive multimedia experience with high impact imagery and a strong bet on long-form storytelling.

Inspired by Snow Fall, the new Newsweek promises an integrated experience also with advertising. It will be interesting to see how they implement what they call advertising “native” to the experience.

In the meantime, the brand-new site has already a clear winner: the reader.

Workshop

Commercial storytelling: engage your audience and keep it forever

Sponsored by the Islington Chamber of Commerce

Besides assisting businesses with web design solutions, we are running training workshops on commercial storytelling.

They are geared specifically towards start-ups, small businesses and medium-sized enterprises.

Our upcoming workshop will be held on:
24 May 2013

This workshop will address a range of relevant questions including:

• Why storytelling works and how stories can help to communicate the core messages of your business.
• How storytelling stretches your marketing investment.
• How to leverage your company story in your relationships with investors, new staff, key clients, key partners/allies, the media and other stakeholders.

Find out more information and book your place here.

Spaces are limited so book your place today to avoid disappointment.

We look forward to seeing you soon!

I came to the Photographers Gallery in central London to meet a new potential client. She didn’t arrive.

I can’t write briefly about the emotions involved when informality strikes on my face, but for the sake of getting it all out, yes, I spent money and time and put a futile effort of getting there on time.

Now, how do you recover from this bad-starting morning?

“There are ways and means”, to use a phrase of a plumber when I asked him how he could fix a problem in my bathroom.

This was my way:

First I added to the expenses a very expensive chocolate cake. It helped a bit.

Then I started reading an amazing piece of work published last December by The New York Times. This fixed my morning.

It is a rich media story and it was the perfect antidote to overcome bad feelings.

The feature is called Snow Fall. The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek and it tells the harrowing story of 16 experienced skiers caught in an avalanche.

The reporter, designers and developers managed to combine an engaging narrative with media elements that supported and complemented the story at every single phase of the story.

It was the best way to spend a chunk of my morning. I can say this is one of the best online projects I’ve ever experienced.

Never mind I don’t have a new client.

Read: Snow Fall

Read: How we made Snow Fall

1. Story discovery

Designing Stories was commissioned to redesign GoLocalise website. This is a London-based multilingual company with global ambitions.

As we enter the final stages of this project, we decided it was time to start sharing the experience.

The current site is essentially a collection of pages with huge amount of information: long text, stock images, rich media content, animation and video.  Menus grew up over the years with feature after feature, which made the site difficult to navigate. Where did we start?

We took the approach of journalism: finding the story first.

The first phase of this project took several days of research, detailed content audit and a series of interviews with GoLocalise to identify the company’s central message.

That was the fundamental first step.

David Garcia-Gonzalez founder and managing director of GoLocalise, explains why a content audit was “of paramount importance” for the redesign:

“The site has over 6GB of data, and information translated and organised in 9 different languages. This was a bit chaotic, as there were menus inside of menus, and some information was not easy to find.

“We need to sell our services, and ensure potential clients clearly know what we do in a clear and concise way. The complete redesign has greatly benefit from the audit, and now looking back, it feels utterly necessary for this to have been carried out at that stage”.

Mandarin? No problem. Spanish, French or Russian? Well, that’s GoLocalise core business: helping companies to reach foreign markets. 

And they do it from a state of the art premises in London and with an army of professional translators and voiceovers from all over the world.

This was the central narrative we tried to uncover during the first few weeks of the project.

The redesign, we hope, will reflect that GoLocalise is thousand words in one name. It is “translation and voice over services under one roof”.

Now, how do you actually design that? Over the next few weeks, we will be sharing in this blog the entire redesign process.

If you want to be up to date with these entries and be among the first to see the new site, subscribe here to Designing Stories newsletter.

Designing Stories was asked by the BBC to help them translate the interview with the daughter of one of the world’s most iconic revolutionaries, Che Guevara.

Miryam Audiffred lent her translation skills and voice to Aleida Guevara, daughter of Ernesto Che Guevara.

Aleida was in London at the BBC World Service’s studios, where she spoke about her earliest memories of her father.

Listen to the interview: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/p00xzbqx

The podcast is also available for download here: http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/worldservice/outlook/outlook_20120919-1332a.mp3

But they are meaningless steps if you are not telling the story of your client.

Even from the initial sketches, the designer must be pursuing the brand’s story, not a personal opinion.

This is the good advice of Marcin Trender:

“To create a stunning user experience for our users we need to do both – design & tell the story. If we just create a wireframe based on our own opinion (not knowledge and research) and tell a very persuasive story to stakeholders – we’ll risk creating a poor experience.”

And Duckrabbit said it in a different way:

“A good producer is one who doesn’t let their ‘creativity’ get in the way of the STORY. (It’s not about YOU)”.

We call it Story-first web design.

Every day, a guy with a terrific voice drives around the streets of London singing from a beautiful blue Bedford Van. He is not a professional singer nor an actor, but a handyman. A singing handyman!

He advertises his handyman business, which is the usual type of handyman work like plumbing, gardening, office cleaning and general repairs, singing loudly over 1950’s tracks. A microphone with speakers is attached to his van and this is not the whole story: his van blows bubbles and a Teddy bear gives him company in the co-driver seat.

That’s storytelling on the move.

One of the most extreme examples of how a website should be designed with storytelling at its core is not an online business.

It is actually a brick and mortar boutique shop located in Manhattan’s Chelsea district.

It’s a shop called STORY, a particular company that changes its inventory five or six times a year according to a specific theme.

The store founder is Rachel Shechtman and the story she is telling this month is “New York”.

“We are bringing NY to life with goods chosen to encapsulate the State’s spirit, taste, and culture”, says Shechtman in her blog.

The theme “New York” was preceded by “Love” and “Color” and all the items on sale and the interior design reflect those stories.

This is a retail space that has the point of view of a magazine, changes like a gallery and sells things like a store.

If Shechtman is able to recreate a physical “retail narrative”, why so many businesses don’t bother at all and persist using the same design for all their digital messages?

Lesson are strong:  Find your story -the central narrative of your business- and work with your web designer to create a unique experience online.

And, if you have the resources and the ambition don’t just replicate that template. Change your digital store and make it is as unique as your story is.

Starting up a company is tough. It really is. It has taken us months of networking, hands-on learning of basic finance and accountancy and the developing of a business mindset. Yes, we are now entrepreneurs, and, yes, we are building the aeroplane…

A few days ago, the American blogger Robert Scoble was speaking with the guys at the Silicon Valley agency Zurb about the importance of building company stories.

He said that people who are building companies have to be crazy.

“It’s like jumping off a cliff and building a parachute on the way down and assuming that you’re going to figure it out while you’re falling”.

On Twitter, someone changed the phrase and put “aeroplane” instead of parachute, which is nice.

Scoble made also a great point:

“When someone says they’re building a company, they’re usually unique. There’s something different about them. And they have an approach like I’m building something of value that should last something deeper than just a cool technology that’s going to get bought by Google and flipped.”

We invite you to listen to the whole interview in ZURBsoapbox. 

It’s worth the time!

The book Inside The Story is coming soon… and is packed with insights and advice.

We are honored to be part of the project, which is the brain-child of the multi-talented and tireless Adam Westbrook.

He has just posted a quick video update on the book.

The book will raise money for Kiva, the developing world entrepreneurship charity. Please share it with everyone who could benefit from it!

Be the first to know, follow Adam Westbrook blog here or add your email here to hear when the books is launched.