The Salon.com redesign
Having not too long ago created a blog template (yes, it started out as Blogger's "minima" template, but I like to imagine I did nice things to it), I sympathize with the challenges Salon faced in trying to create a harmonious, inviting, readable style. And the old look was getting a little long in the tooth, not unlike the taste of Coca Cola, circa 1985. Unfortunately, the result of Salon's efforts just looks bad. It is uninviting to the eye, with a too-narrow column of text on the far right and a much-too-wide main column. One thing I learned setting up my blog is that your text columns won't work as wide as you'd expect. Wide columns are uninviting and hard to read. Take a look at your favorite (other) online publications and it should be clear that Salon is in about the 95th percentile of wide.
The new layout doesn't use white/negative space well, giving a grey-expanse effect. Tagged with same-sized thumbnail graphics, stories on the front page don't stand out graphically, and they no longer carry taglines to show where they fit in thematically--it's just today's stories, yesterday's stories, etc. There are too many typefaces.
Links to selected stories appear in a horizontal box just below the banner for the day's featured story. The borders of this box are lines of little dots for no obvious reason, and the box finishes raggedly on the right, also for no obvious reason. Below this box is a section headed "Blog Box," which is not in a box. With apologies to Page and Plant, it makes me wonder.
Finally, Salon chose a really strange chartreuse accent color (shown). While this shade may grab your attention, it does so by inducing you to ask "Is my monitor calibrated correctly?"
Be honest: is this the shade you want people to associate with your product? I'm not a branding consultant, but if I were I might consider holding back this color in case one of my clients ever wanted to market a line of bile supplements.Evidently Salon vetted the new look with focus group testing in San Francisco, where the magazine is based, prompting my friend and me to independently observe something along the lines of "people in San Francisco are messed up."
posted at 11:14 PM
1 Comments:
Good comments. Hope you don't mind if I bring some of them back to Table Talk.
The thing that irks me most is that the old Salon was at least partly designed so it took advantage of the nature of the web, something that was rare already when that design was new. Things like very good readability, old articles accessible both by date, section and a topical index. The old Salon was also very very pleasing to read with all graphics turned off - something the new one certainly isn't. (And so far I haven't been able to find the plain-text/PDA edition at all, must go and bitch about that.)
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