NYT Tries a New Scrolling Technique That Gets Much Attention

On July 18, the NY Times published a long article describing the terrible fire that gutted the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris earlier this year. Investigative journalism is something that the NY Times is known for, but the presentation of the Notre Dame article caught the attention of many web designers because of the numerous scrolling effects used.

The story starts with the sequence of events just before firefighters responded to the fire. After a few paragraphs, page visitors see a digital model of the historical cathedral along with the adjacent sacristy and presbytery structures, and this is when the neat scrolling effects begin. As readers make their way down the page, they see darkened boxes of text with sentences describing how a security guard alerted the fire department, but only after climbing to the attic and noticing that flames were burning out of control. The route taken by the security guard is depicted by means of animated red lines and orange markers highlighting sections of the ancient cathedral.

After a few more paragraphs and photographs that scroll down in a more traditional manner, page visitors are treated to a video mosaic showing the fire burning from different angles, thus getting an eyewitness-like feeling of being in Paris on that day. More videos can be appreciated by readers as they progress through the article, and a more impressive version of the aforementioned church model is displayed for greater context; this time, the 3D model rotates and an animated diagram of the fire brigades containing the fire is explained by floating text boxes. Similar scrolling effects describe how some firefighters managed to move across the church as its wooden spire collapsed.

The NY Times is not the only publication using scrolling effects to tell compelling stories. Across the Atlantic Ocean, the BBC has used also used this effect, which can be accomplished with the ScrollMagic.io JavaScript library. The trade name for this kind of effects is "snow falling," and it helps to engage younger readers whose attention spans may be shorter because of the new paradigm of scrolling down for fresh and exciting content. For more information click here https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/07/16/world/europe/notre-dame.html.