Development Seed

For the past few months, we’ve had our heads down working on many technical aspects of Managing News, our fully-loaded team aggregator, and we’ve written about a little of that here and here. And as I mentioned last week, we’re also tackling giving the tool a new look. We’re completely redesigning the user interface of the tool and at the same time designing a public website to promote it.

One thing that we’ve run into with Managing News is that it’s easy to explain what it does to tech-savvy people, and it’s easy to explain what makes it different from other aggregators (collaborative and analytical tools). But what’s tricky – and I’m sure many of you have run into this too – is explaining the concept of an aggregator to someone who hasn’t used one and doesn’t understand RSS. Managing News is a team aggregator, and we want everyone on a team to use it – ranging from the web girl right up to the executive director. This makes it crucial that people can get what it does in a glance. But how do you communicate that?

Well, we gathered out team together over coffee and bagels and brainstormed how to do this. After a lot of great and questionable ideas, we decided on one: a dog with a newspaper. It’s a classic image that most people have seen hundreds of times, it’s cute, and it says what an aggregator does – it brings the news to you. This became the logo, which you can see here. As the design process advanced, we decided that we wanted more than just a logo to get this simple message across, especially on the public website which we’ll use to get the word out about Managing News. We needed a dog.

We searched for photos from all of our usual sources but couldn’t find one that spoke to Managing News. Frankly, many of the photos we found were of dogs carrying plastic newspaper toys, which wasn’t what we were going for. Then Young brought up his difficulty finding a great photo, and Will sent us a photo of his dog Maggie. She’s the perfect Managing News mascot. So one sunny afternoon a few weeks ago Will and Maggie went went outside and Will took 187 photos of Maggie running around with a newspaper in her mouth. Here’s a look at some of them.

After careful deliberation and flurry of comments on our intranet, we picked a winner.

And now that we’ve piqued your interest, stay tuned… We’ll be releasing the public Managing News site and lots of screenshots of the new user interface in the coming weeks.