How Great Design Can Save Democracy & The NYTimes

For the last 8 years, I have gathered my morning coffee and toast and read salon.com. Last year, Joan Walsh became the managing editor. More and more salon has become the "Joan Walsh Show" and the tone of salon.com, like MoveOn.org, no longer reflect my opinions or interests. During this process of losing interest, I found myself starting my day at NYTimes.com and falling in love with it a little more each day.

I think a lot of the attraction is the crisp clean look and the visual interpretation of information. If you have missed the Olympics graphics, you are depriving yourself of seeing their interactive moment-by-moment dissections of Deng Linlin’s floor routine or Yelena Isinbayeva’s High Flying Pole Vault.

Leading the design team at NYTimes.com is Khoi Vinh and he wrires on his personal blog about his disinterest in the Olympics, he must be the harbinger of great design at the New York Times.

Today, Richard Grefé, the executive director of AIGA, and Jessica Friedman Hewitt, managing director of Aiga’s Design for Democracy , provides with an incredible visual presentation of How Design Can Save Democracy.

While Mr Khoi may not be personally responsible for this shift towards great design, he is at the very least responsible for the bringing good visuals to the New York Times online presence.