After seeing New York's "Snow Fall"[1], Exposure[2] and being inspired by Medium's focus on typography, and content, I wanted to do something simpler for Wordpress. However, I realized I have to removed lots of features so it can be used by most people and be able to switch to other themes - I don't want to hold them with plugins, and custom hooks to their contents that they're stuck with my theme. Nonetheless, the power of Wordpress also gives you lots of freedom to do interesting stuffs, specially the newly introduced (since Wordpress 3.6) post formats[3].<p>So, I have partnered with another great designer, was once an intern with iA[4], and we have released our first iteration of a Typographically tailored theme for Wordpress - clean designs, minimal gears, wholesome focus on the content and big photos - Acorn Wordpress Theme[5].<p>Our idea is to keep making it better, enhancing it without adding anything additional than the theme itself, no plugins required to work nor custom fields. When the user wants a new theme, their content should continue to just work.<p>P.S. I never liked parallax scrolling unless that makes sense for the content in display. It reminds me of Skip Intro.<p>1. <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/</a>
2. <a href="https://exposure.so/" rel="nofollow">https://exposure.so/</a>
3. <a href="http://codex.wordpress.org/Post_Formats" rel="nofollow">http://codex.wordpress.org/Post_Formats</a>
4. <a href="http://ia.net/" rel="nofollow">http://ia.net/</a>
5. <a href="http://demo-wp.theme6.com/acorn/" rel="nofollow">http://demo-wp.theme6.com/acorn/</a>
This looks to have been heavily inspired by Medium and their ilk (who were in turn no doubt inspired by the simplicity of the SVBTLE network).<p>If anything, it confirms the importance of the hard work that the Medium team have been doing w/r/t online article UX, and it'll be interesting to see what comes of it.
This looks like a great way to create these "scrolling experiences," but I've always found them highly distracting. I'm constantly scrolling to get the paragraph I'm reading in the "sweet spot" about 3/4 of the way up the monitor, and it bothers me when pictures are half-revealed by some scripting trickery. To me the constant "interaction" is more like a constant reminder that you are navigating a story on the Internet. Personally I like it when the page stands still and I read it from the top left to the bottom right, like a book page, then can click somewhere or hit a key and have it advance. I'm working on making my own thing like that based on the three-column journals of the 19th century, but all I have so far is some static html :(.<p>That said, this looks really useful for making that type of story/experience and I hope it's adopted and used tastefully.
Serious question: What is the benefit of having big pictures stack instead of scroll? The Aesop video has big images that dont move, but get covered up by text as you scroll. I've seen this in other websites. What is the advantage? I find it makes me lose my place on a page, but that's just me. Wondering if there's any usability research behind the stacked images effect.
Heads up that <a href="http://aesopstories.com" rel="nofollow">http://aesopstories.com</a> is a bit mangled on the latest version of desktop Safari. I do like the concept, but I was trying to figure out if there's a way to host all of the javascript and assets on my own infrastructure after the story is created.
Uh. If this is your homepage <a href="http://aesopstories.com/" rel="nofollow">http://aesopstories.com/</a> it looks cheap. At the very list you should leave some blank space on the sides. On my screen (in Chrome) the text is almost cut from the browser.
This literally looks like a Medium.com theme for Wordpress, and if I'm not mistaken there's a lot here that a solid frontend developer could do in their sleep. Many have done more spec work and not asked for crowdfunded money to produce it.<p>And if I WERE asking for money, I'd definitely make sure my project homepage worked in Safari.