Pitchfork launched a redesign last week. The reaction has been mixed. Some have picked on the new, subtler logo, the exclusive use of Helvetica, and the boxiness of the new layout. One person tweeted, “Not wild about the Pitchfork redesign. I give it a 6.8.” (Credit to Billboard for finding that gem.)
Sadly for Pitchfork, a site I visit often, all of these observations have merit, though they miss the real reason why people’s reactions are so meh: from the users standpoint, the new design does not have a clear raison d’etre.
To put it another way, is the content better served by the new design? To determine such a thing is near impossible, although I guess traffic would be a good benchmark. Reactionary blog posts are probably not.
Personally, I would have liked to have seen a more radical approach to structure. Pitchfork, like many sites who are juggling not only a lot of content, but a lot of different kinds of content, has not yet found a elegant way of seamlessly promoting that content. Their approach, which is more functional than it is engaging, is to dump each content type into its own box and then to order the boxes according to editorial priority—reviews, news, new music, video, respectively. They are more interested in making it easy for the user to find the kind of content they’re looking for, rather then telling the user what content they should be looking for. And while the latter may not sound like an appealing idea in the Internet age, it is a fundamental service provided by any editorial product.
So I guess I’m saying the Pitchfork redesign represents a minor cop out. I say minor because this is an incredibly difficult challenge, both from a design and an editorial perspective, and to be fair, the new design is visually appealing. Album art, photography and video are given more “room to breathe.” The site’s navigation is somewhat improved, especially on interior pages, where the site is doing a better job of promoting related content, creating an especially vicious rabbit hole.
Luckily, the content is so good, I’m sure they’re going to have plenty of more time to figure it out.
Daily Dot interested in covering Reddit, Digg, 4Chan, not so interested in letting users share their content on them
The Daily Dot, a digital “newspaper” that will cover social media communities—think Reddit, Digg, 4Chan—like metro beats, is a great idea. It’s easy to see where the traffic will come from: Not only will the locals clamor to see their names “in print,” but the outsiders, intimidated yet intrigued by sites like 4Chan, will stop by to gawk at the exotic products of these communities’ cultivated insularity.
It’s a win-win, except for one small thing: They are neither interested in making it easy to share their content on anything but Twitter and Facebook, nor are they interested in tracking its popularity on other social media sites.
The question is why. Now, I think there may actually be a reason for this—aside from your usual startup hiccup. These guys know these communities. They know how their users operate. I don’t think they saw it as a conflict of interest or playing favorites. That would be taking the newspaper metaphor a bit too far. I think there’s a deeper explanation for it: Those social media buttons just don’t work.
We have had clients tell us that only Twitter and Facebook integration has been successful in driving significant traffic to the site and while its nice to include the Reddit and Digg icons, they do nothing. If that is the case, then it would make sense that the editors of the Daily Dot thought that the inclusion of those buttons would undermine their credibility, as those buttons demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of how those communities function. Am I warm?
So what does that mean to a site whose sole purpose is to cover these communities? Truthfully, the most reasonable explanation is that this is a startup and they just haven’t gotten around to it. But even that explanation hints at a real issue: if it’s something that can be easily omitted, how important is this kind of social media integration to an editorial product?
The new Nieman Journalism Lab is confident you will scroll down
Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab launched a redesign today, again demonstrating their wisdom regarding the interwebs. Everyone knows the last Monday in August is National Soft Launch Day. (Oh, I just made that up? Doesn’t matter. Nobody is reading this, just like nobody will notice that the Twitter bar at the top of NJL’s homepage is one pixel off. It will be fixed by the time the Uniques get back from drinking Mai Tais at some Cancun Club Med. Didn’t I just mention it’s the last week in August?)
To be honest, that one pixel—which is probably unique to my browser (hey njl, it’s firefox v. 6)—is the only proof I could find that suggests this is indeed a soft launch. Kudos! It’s a sharp, well thought out redesign. Don’t trust me. You can take a quick tour with director Joshua Benton.
So what does their redesign tell us about their vision of the future of journalism?
* Your users will scroll down. The new NJL features no less than 8 stories above the fold on its homepage. All its other offerings, the newly minted Fuego, Encyclo, its app and other Nieman spin-offs, are further down the page.
* More “magezine-y” design means more of a focus on features.
* Pick a pretty font for your headlines.
* Double down on Wordpress.
* Double down on Twitter.
Condé Nast digital has been busy this August, launching redesigns of both WWD.com and VanityFair.com. Nothing really new to see here. They’ve even kept the Graydon Carter bobblehead on the 404 page.
I did uncover one little interesting (perhaps only to font geeks?) difference between the two sites. Both designs benefit mightily from font replacement, but only one site gets the benefit of a Condé Nast custom coded font replacement. That would be Vanity Fair. The magazine’s logo and titles uses VF Sans, a custom font. Since I assume VF is the only one with the license to use the font, it naturally wouldn’t be available on a font replacement service like TypeKit. So they had to go build the code themselves. That’s what I call investing in your brand.
Andy Rutledge's nytimes.com designs are pretty, but some of his thoughts about news sites are ugly
Why does Andy Rutledge have to make it so hard to like his designs? His suggestions for the Times are elegant, but they are a little misguided. Websites need to be more readable and usable and to a degree, Rutledge presents some elegant solutions to those problems. But he goes too far in making his point. Here are some mistaken assumptions about the news industry:
1) The news industry has abandoned actual journalism. That’s just silly. If that were true, if all of the content was bullshit, what would be the point of redesigning it?
2) The newspaper’s “promotional strategy” and “pandering” is “thoughtless.” Actually, they have put a lot of thought into it. Perhaps it’s executed poorly, but news sites make a lot of money from ads and simply suggesting, “Hey, why don’t you move to subscription model?” isn’t a viable option for a lot of sites. The question really should be: Is there a better way of incorporating advertising into news sites?
3) Most Popular is worthless. People like to know what stories are trending. Dismissing it as social media makes no sense. Like Cameron writes, social media should be integrated into news content. How other people are experiencing the news can be as powerful a reading experience as the news itself.
This all being said. I agree with Rutledge’s point. High quality content deserves high quality design. I would just go one step further. While Rutledge’s design solutions are easier to read and use, I don’t know if they would inspire readers to open their wallets. In order for there to be a subscription based model, I think design has to go even further, treating each piece of content as a discrete design challenge. This means dumping templates. But I would limit this idea to magazine-style content, not daily news content.
Andy Rutledge:
Regarding content strategy and mechanism, today’s ‘news’ is rife with irrelevancies and distractions. Part of this is due to the news industry’s abandonment of actual journalism, but much of it is due to thoughtless promotional strategy and pathetic pandering. I suggest that digital news acquire a responsible and more usable approach.
Andy’s arguments and mockups are both very well-conceived — I would love to see online journalism (all of it, not just NYT) head in this direction. His design concepts are fabulous.
I do believe, however, there should be an affordance for social components in news media, as the context of others’ opinions as to what is news and what isn’t, and what is more important news for that matter, can be helpful in sifting through the daily deluge of reported information. Not that peers are more discerning than editors, mind you, but that their voices (ours, that is) should be allowed to influence society’s understanding of the world around us.
Hey, old friend. New design looks great. Definite improvement on the old one. But what happened to the navigation menu at the top of the site? I want to navigate. It’s a little cheeky to make me scroll down to find your silos, verticals, buckets, whathaveyou, etc. Is that the point?
Not only is this interesting as a matter of historical record, but design, too. Notice how LITTLE the page changes day to day. The main photo and the text changes, but visually, it’s the same structure and layout every day. Kinda boring, no? Remarkably, the only major changes to the homepage are not due to large breaking stories, but ads. Perhaps it’s time to rethink the flexible homepage.
Time-lapsing the New York Times Home Page
Phillip Mendonça-Vieira ran an errant cron job that ended up taking two screenshots of the New York Times home page every hour from September 2010 to July 2011. The fortunate result of the mistake: 12,000 screenshots of what the Times felt important for its home page.
Phillip writes that most publications don’t save their frontpage layout data and if the printed newspaper ceases to exist, society will lose key historical snapshots of the every day.
Via Phillip:
This, in my humble opinion, is a tragedy because in many ways our frontpages are summaries of our perspectives and our preconceptions. They store what we thought was important, in a way that is easy and quick to parse and extremely valuable for any future generations wishing to study our time period.
Notable moments: Chilean miners at 0:39, Arab Spring at 3:38 and Japanese Tsunami at 4:54
Love how The Times illustrated this op-ed about food trucks. They were able to leverage the vertical nature of the illustration in a visually interesting way online, making this page look different from how it looks every other day.
OK! You got me. I’m a little biased. The op-ed happens to be written by my brother, Zach, who for over the last five years has been the stomach behind midtownlunch.com. He is what you would call an authority—and now he has the Times op-ed to prove it. Very nice!
Anil Dash gives animated GIFs his seal of approval through an historical treatise on the maligned artform.
What’s truly remarkable about Dash’s essay is that it only includes one example of an established online editorial product using animated gifs. (If you’re curious, it was The New York Times.) I know it’s just anecdotal—I doubt Dash did a comprehensive review of all editorial sites for this piece—but his findings are hard to argue with, since my own experience would seem to back him up: editorial websites have not embraced animated gifs.
Mind you, this is not important because I am some aficionado of animated gifs (although like Dash, I do share an affinity for the format), but it points to a general lack of experimentation in design at large editorial sites.
[Found via BetaBeat]
Bill Simmons hasn’t put up a podcast since Thursday of last week. It’s an odd time for the arguably the world’s most popular sports columnist to go quiet. We’re right smack dab in the middle of the NBA Finals and the man who made his name on writing about basketball is curiously absent. Now, I know why.
He was launching a website.
Grantland went live today, complete with a (very) long introduction from Simmons, its editor. He explains its goals thusly:
The first was to find writers we liked and let them do their thing. The second was to find sponsors we liked and integrate them within the site — so readers didn’t have to pay for content, and also, so we didn’t have to gravitate toward quantity over quality just to chase page views. The third was to take advantage of a little extra creative leeway for the right reasons and not the wrong ones. And the fourth was to hire the right blend of people — mostly young, mostly up-and-comers, all good people with good ideas who aren’t afraid to share them.
All admirable. Good luck to you as you figure this all out, Simmons.
Bill, if I may? One suggestion. Tighten that homepage. Your first story doesn’t show up until 660 px down the page—that’s almost below the fold territory. That photo at the top is great, but it’s static (I assume). It’s dead air and it will suck the life out of your homepage. In your next iteration (and I’m sure there will be many), tighten up that header and get those stories firmly above the fold where they belong.
