Redbrick Builds the News

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After Presentations

We have just finished presenting our project and are awaiting for the feedback and results. All the teams had extremely interesting and innovative ideas, which does not make it any easier for us. We are sure the judges are facing a very difficult decision of choosing which team deserves special recognition. But whatever the results are, we will all walk out of the Hub with something valuable, whether it is the prize, packets of Haribo, new skills or great memories of these two days.

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Prototype

          This morning has been very productive considering how much fun we had last night. We're making good progress with INFORM, we're starting to test how it actually works on mobile devices. We have started putting together our presentation and we look forward to showing everyone that longform can look just as good on your mobile as it does on desktop.

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The last 30 minutes of productive work for day 1. Look how much coding is going on. It's soon time to go to bed to restore our energy levels for tomorrow. Ha, don't be fooled! We soon will be making our way to the pub, folks.

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Logo concept

                         This is our logo idea. Since our main objective is to create a smooth, flowing longform experience for readers, we thought that having a light font and minimalistic graphic will convey this feeling of easy access to the longform and navigation through it. 

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Branding and logo sketching, because it's all about the looks (not really, but).

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Build The News: Take 2

Good afternoon, everyone! Redbrick's team hits London to take part in Build The News competition once again.During this weekend long event, hosted by The Times, we are going to be competing with the country’s leading student newspapers in developing and designing an innovative way to present longform articles on mobile platforms.

Devbrick cheery and ready to rock on the way to the venue - Impact hub Westminster.

We have entered in the Longform category. Longform articles are a fancy and entertaining way to present stories using cross-platform multimedia content alongside with text. At the moment we are developing ideas of how we can meet our top 3 objectives:

Reduce scrolling (because it's boring)

Restrict data usage

Ensure multimedia content is always there to entertain readers

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The Final Result

We're happy to say that we won the prize in our category: Tactile, with our article sharing platform, Digest. Each member of our team will receive a 3 months free subscription to Spotify as a prize.

The overall winners of the weekend were the team from City University and Imperial College London with their project 'Low Pass'. The innovative tool they had developed would allow journalists to view the most relevant tweets in the time period just after a crucial news event was unfolding. All the projects from the day can be seen here: http://build.hackdash.org/

 Team photograph by Matthew Taylor (@mattietk). To see more photos from the weekend, check out Flickr.

Thanks for following our blog. We hope to build again bigger and better next year!

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Sit back, relax and digest

We've given our presentation now and are reasonably pleased with how it went. Whilst there's much more we wanted to say, we got across our main message - 'Digest' is built to be a platform for meaningful, personal sharing, much like your experience on a Sunday when sharing out parts of the paper with your family. 

We offered the audience a chance to use 'Digest', allowing people to engage in our interface and see how the sharing experience would work within their community. Going forward, this will help provide feedback to develop a really strong digital sharing platform. 

That's it from Ashley, Chris, Josh, Sabrina and James. The winner's will soon be announced and then we have to dash off for a train. Build The News has been a great event and we've thoroughly enjoyed the challenge of innovating digital news and chatting with others who share our passion. 

Photograph: Nicola Ryan

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It's the final countdown #buildthenews @redbrickpaper @timesdevelops

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First Prototype

We're currently playing with (trying to break) our first prototype. Our team has formed the first community on Digest; we're able to easily share articles that we know  the individual/ whole community will like. We can then consume them at our own content - on a platform that looks good and is easy to use.

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Branding

In light of the presentation that all of the Build The News teams are shortly due to give, we've been working on branding our product. On the web app, the user will be greeted with a simple introduction explaining it, along the lines of:

"Digest is a place where the people who know you best give you the stories they know you’ll love.

"This is your streamlined online edition of the news. Those closest to you will form your community, sharing what you want to read."

We've finally settled on a logo which Ashley put together, which can also be seen alongside the other projects on HackDash. The graphic is meant to tap into the idea of the Sunday lean-back experience: you sit on the sofa, relax, and digest the stories which your family or community think you'd like. 

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Coding the Designs

This morning, we've been working on turning Sabrina's designs into reality. While Josh and Chris have been working on the back-end of our platform, so that the webpages will collate and display the correct data, James has been using HTML5 and CSS3 to create templates for the user interface. 

The above is an example of how an article page would display. It requires user data as well as the article's image, title and text, to be loaded within the template design.

We've made sure to find a way to display the image prominently and effectively, and also to ensure that the article is easy to read. We are also emphasising the ability to share articles, particularly through our platform Digest, by using a floating share box that remains on the edge of the screen as the user scrolls down the page. The article also ends with a reminder to the user to share with someone else in their community.

Meanwhile, Ashley has been working on the presentation we will be delivering to everyone else later today, and Sabrina has been thinking about our logo. Here's one of her designs:

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Building Resumes

After taking full advantage of a rather generous bar tab last night, it's been a slightly slower start this morning. Now it's back to work to produce a great new web tool.

We're currently focused on forming an aesthetically pleasing interface for the app, and a couple of us are specifically targeting the reader experience as an area that needs developing.

We're also consolidating our code base using version control, and we'll be sharing access to later in the day - watch this space!

The team (minus James):

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Reading Content in Style

This is a mock-up of the experience of reading an article which has been shared with you. Our platform will pull in the main feature image from the original piece and expand it to fill the top half of the screen on mobile, tablet and desktop. If there is a video in the source content, then this will be pulled in instead. The title of the piece will appear in a banner across the image with a background colour according to the category of news it falls under.

You will be able to see what has been shared, when it was shared, and who shared it. At this point, the user can hook up with other social media sites with the list option on the right-hand toolbar and re-post the story on a public scale.

We have left a significant margin of white space either side of the article for a clean read without distractions.

As you scroll down the page and reach the end of the article, our platform will have pulled in any images from the source article and put them into a gallery which you can scroll through. You also have the option to re-share this article with another footie fan in one of your Digest communities.

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Developing

Chris, Josh, Ashley, James and Sabrina are well under way in their project to create a digital answer to the Sunday paper.

In attempting to simulate the experience of sharing parts of the paper and articles with people in your family and community, our platform has produced exciting challenges and opportunities for us to develop a personal sharing experience. 

We're currently working on the branding of the product, whilst considering how it would fit into existing digital packages such as Times+.

Our wireframe designs are currently being visualised in a Wordpress prototype with languages such as PHP, CSS3, Javascript and HTML5.

Check out Josh's coding:

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Sense Check Feedback

We've just pitched our initial ideas to a panel of experts at Build the News. We had 10 minutes to outline our plans. The professionals had some tough questions for us to chew over, including: how can we engage the older user who has no contacts? and, who is sharing aimed at: the individual or the community?

We're currently brainstorming ideas on how to facilitate multiple log-ins within one family, so that different users will be able to share stories from the Times with one another.

James has been working on the design for how articles will look when they are shared on our platform:

Josh and Chris are getting stuck into coding, with Sabrina and Ashley working on design and usability.