Similarly I suspect most of these different individual maps are just bad. Whimsy and idiosyncrasy are all very well in theory, but in practice they're mostly just annoying.
But in general I assume you're right about the actual quality and it was hinted in the text. And when you take a look at the maps provided as examples, some of them are not accessible[1]. And for news articles, it really depends for me. Most of the time, I want the essence. But sometimes, especially with articles that are not actually news but a deeper analysis of a situation (e.g. ukraine war, palestine), I've read articles where on mobile it helped that they put extra effort in making the media work for the information by interleaving graphics, scrolling text, and so forth.[2] But as always this is also a matter of taste.
[1] e.g.: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr... [2] I haven't bookmarked those texts and I am not sure if it is actual useful to pick one random example for this discussion so I just save my time searching for this one example I only vaguely remember.
who is this supposed creativity for? If the majority of people just want to scan headlines efficiently and read/parse.. isn't that a good thing for most people?
Pragmatically speaking, the creativity is not needed for news articles/headlines. We need better reporting / journalism in online news, not more creative frills..
Newspapers also. Same handful of column layouts, typefaces, styling.
It's not about user metrics. It's that what's important is the content of the text itself, alongside whatever photographs and illustrations are necessary and informative.
Websites are no different from the long tradition of books and newspapers in this regard.
There are plenty of spaces for artistic, aesthetic creativity on the internet. No shortage whatsoever. More art than there's ever been before.
There's no need in also trying to shoehorn it into nonfiction articles everywhere.
Myspace and Geocieties were already a couple of generation on from that, and ... frankly kind of a mess.
For the most part, I vastly prefer the Reader View rendering of websites over whatever's native. Design gets in the way of many things, including robustness and resilience over time (what happens when all those dependencies and embedded resources go away and/or are replace by pr0n, crypto miners, phishing, and/or surveillance payloads?), and simple legibility.
It's the exceedingly rare instance where "interactive" pages provide any additional information or capabilities, and virtually all of those are specialised one-offs. I'm thinking of several of the xkcd specials, or the work of Bret Victor or Nicky Case. I'm sorely hard pressed to think of any others. Mainstream pubs (notably the NY Times) are far worse for their efforts in this space.
1. A more creative website by definition will take more attention to engage with than a less creative website.
2. Many users just "want the info" with minimal attention spend.
Hence the sites that take less attention to deliver the info will win - the less creative ones...
Maybe?!?
https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/64240ee4eb3a3b4b2059ff7c/...
Interestingly, with the fact that the article is digital, surely we can leverage so many more different and interesting ways to present the information, but I feel like most prefer to just read the text.
I think it's because everyone reads a paper article in a different way. If you ask people how they read a magazine, you'll get as many responses as respondents. Some read back to front (I do that for some reason), some read articles from top to bottom, some scan through and look at the pictures and captions, then pulled quotes, then the main text. Some even read the paragraphs out of order and assembles it all afterwards.
Everyone consumes a body of text in a different way, and an article that jacks your scroll and does "fancy" stuff with the way you can access the content makes assumptions about how the reader prefers to consume the content, and this assumption is often very wrong for me personally.