Immrs

New media focuses mainly on today’s issues, but often as a reader it can be hard to recall how a conflict or situation first started. Immrs offers a solution by fusing old news reports into a story in a file. This way Immrs provides answers to your questions and a new life for old news.

Short news articles from different sources are bundled in a file. This creates a timeline of a conflict, topic or social issue. In this way, articles from months or years ago will become relevant again and you get an insight in how long-term issues develop.

The core of the Immrs files is text, so we paid a lot of attention to typography. The aim is to create an “immersive” experience; an environment without distraction that draws you in completely. In order to accomplish this we conducted extensive research in collaboration with the letter designer Bas Jacobs of Underware.

Distinctive typography can be a recognizable branding element.  For the headings of the items we therefore chose the Noe Display font. For long texts, a low-contrast font and few details are best readable. For this we chose the Lyon Text.

By default, text is not broken up on the web. By using the Hypher.js JavaScript, this is possible.

Because typography played such a major role in this project, we wanted to research good screen typography more thoroughly. Little is known and published about this topic, so we did it ourselves. In collaboration with Bas Jacobs of Underware , we conducted research and published a publication: “Web typography sounds good, but looks awful“.

This publication was presented during the Beeldmakers event on web typography that we organized together with De Brakke Grond. The booklet is for sale at bol.com.

The research was made possible by the Creative Industries Fund.

Currently, Immrs is in the test phase, but a broad group of users was enthusiastic about the beta version. The ambition is to expand Immrs into a self-learning platform that takes the user’s preferences into account. By fusing current news content with the efforts of smart algorithms and human meta-actors, Immrs can provide their users with a personal and thus revolutionary news platform.