BERG, the London-based design agency responsible for projects such as the Little Printer, has revealed its latest effort: Guardian Headliner, a "newspaper that looks back at you." Based on an ambitious initial concept that would have used eye-tracking to monitor reading patterns, Headliner focuses on the importance of eyes. Instead of truly looking out at the reader, it employs face detection to crop around eyes in newspaper photographs, blowing them up to fill the screen. Content is taken from an open API provided by British newspaper The Guardian, which commissioned the project.

In addition to the striking visual aspect of the design, it uses the OpenCalais library to extract key terms and phrases, highlighting them in headlines and summaries — it also provides an intuitive story-to-story keyboard navigation system, allowing readers to browse through the paper in a similar order to its print layout. Check out the explanatory post on the BERG blog for details of the design decisions that went into the project, as well as the practical things that make it work.