As I’ve mentioned, we’re working on a redesign of this site. And that process has meant putting a lot of time into thinking about web design. Not just the pure aesthetics of what looks nice or doesn’t — but how news reporting and political writing can best be arranged on a page.
One thing that recently occurred to me — obvious, but it had never occurred to me — is how print newspapers are highly formulaic in their graphic presentation. They’re pretty much all the same with relatively minor differences at the margins. There’s the tabloid and the broadsheet. But within those two broad categories the basic way layout is remarkably similar — at least in comparison to the wild variety of modes of presentation on the web. To get some examples, see this page from Newseum, which shows daily front pages of hundreds of newspapers around the country and around the world.
I bring all this up because there are two questions I want to throw out there. One is, which papers do you think are the best designed ones on the web? The second is a bit broader. Is a basic formula emerging for publishing ‘newspapers’ on the web? Are certain idioms and styles becoming more and more common while fewer and fewer papers diverge radically from the standard model?
For my money, the New York Times is a very nicely designed site. The Post, on the other hand, just a did a limited redesign. And I think the result is disappointing. They tried to make the front page less busy and add more white space. But the result has an oddly unsegmented and ordered quality. And the fonts seem lifeless. (Yes, you can tell I’ve been thinking a lot about news site design.)
One of the design issues that interests me most about newspapers online is how you recapture the topical serendipity that is a lot of the magic of real newsprint. As you’d probably expect, I gravitate pretty heavily toward political coverage. And in doing so I miss a lot of stuff I don’t know I want to read. I want to read that story on such and such in India or … well, I don’t know what it is. That’s the point. But I want to read it. And it will enrich my day and turn my mind in different directions. Newsprint has that quality that you see these pieces sitting alongside the articles you’re accustomed to reading. There are various ways designers try to capture this experience online — mostly by putting collections of story links adjacent to the article you’re reading. But somehow it’s not quite the same.
Your thoughts about newspaper design online? And what do you think — setting aside the underlying quality of the journalism — is the best designed newspaper website?
