The Big Picture

The Boston Globe just launched a fantastic website called The Big Picture and it's making noise outside of photography circles. The site feature large-size pictures on a single topic (photo essays, basically), and it's amazing that it seems so novel given the inherent flexibility of online presentation. Alan Taylor, the project's creator, wrote a little about his reasons behind making the site on his personal blog:

The sizes of the photographs are deliberately large - taking advantage of the majority of web users who have screens capable of displaying 1024x768 or larger. The long-held tradition of keeping images online tiny and lightweight is commendable still - when designing a general purpose site. But one dedicated to quality imagery should take full advantage of the medium, and I hope I've struck a good balance with The Big Picture.

When I see quality photography consigned to the archives, or when I see bandwidth readily given up to video streams of dubious quality, or when I see photo galleries that act as ad farms, punishing viewers into a click-click-click experience just to drive page views - those times are the times I'm glad I was able to get this project off the ground (many thanks to my friends within boston.com)

So far, it's been mentioned on several influential general-interest blogs like Kottke.org, Waxy.org, and MetaFilter, where the poster wrote: "It's kind of surprising how rare it is to see a really big photo on newspaper sites these days and this blog makes the simple concept work."

5 June 2008 by M. Scott Brauer

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