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New York Times Redesign Points to Future of Online Publishing (CNNMoney)
The last time The New York Times embarked on a wholesale redesign of its website, in 2006, the iPhone wasn’t on the market. Tablets like the iPad were still years away. So the new design that the Times unveiled Wednesday is generating much interest within the journalism industry, both for what it says about the Times and about the future of online publishing. Mashable There are no drastic changes. Gone are the blue headlines and the lengthy sidebar in favor of a grayer digital lady with more white space. But the site feels more like The New York Times than NYTimes.com. “We’re leaning more heavily on the site to maintain our identity,” says Ian Adelman, the director of digital design for the Times. Capital New York It will take a while for the redesign to settle with critics, but judged by the usual Day One tests, it’s a success: It was delivered on time, and to us seems relatively bug-free. But the process, which took two years and the work of 40 people round the clock (and 80 people all together over the life of the project), wasn’t easy. NYT / Public Editor’s Journal Many readers and outside commentators called the redesign cleaner and easier to navigate. One reader, Larry Hollon, wrote to me, in part: “The new digital format is fantastic. It’s clean, easy to read, lots of white space and it organizes information in a way that is very accessible. Thank the appropriate designers. It’s great.” Still, not everyone was happy. Slate / CultureBox No doubt a large reason for the collective shrug at the Times redesign is the fact that little has changed that affects our strategies of consumption. The Times’ editors still signal what they judge most important through the front page, which remains three columns of text with a big picture. Gone, finally, are the blue-hued headlines, which at this point were so outdated they’d nearly traveled past obsolete to retro-chic, a living monument to the Web of Yore, when primitive browsers would not click anything that wasn’t blue. Now, headlines look as they do in the Times’ print edition.
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