Live data from Hacker News

New Boston Globe website design

bostonglobe.com

41–50 of 111 posts

Re: New Boston Globe website design

#41
I would have liked to see the resize use additional space by bringup an additional column of headlines instead of just expanding the already useless picture.

Here's a nice thread on newspaper designs, shamelessly jumping to my head-to-head of above-the-fold comparisons of the top 10

http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...

Re: New Boston Globe website design

#42
I have terrible vision, and utilize the browsers zoom function a lot. On their new site, I can zoom without having to do a lot of horizontal scrolling (just in Firefox though, doesn't seem to work as well in Chrome). So, aside from the aesthetic for the masses, there's an element of accessibility here that shouldn't be overlooked.

Re: New Boston Globe website design

#43
This is a great responsive design. This works, in part, because it is a news site with predictable image sizes, headline sizes, and very limited GUI. If you want to build something that is more graphically intensive, with more focus on visual appeal in traditional browser sizes, it gets more and more complicated. I'm working on a project now actually, and it's pain. I'm not saying it can't be done (it can with a lot of work). It's just more difficult and time-intensive the more graphics you use.

Re: New Boston Globe website design

#44
This looks great. It's awesome that we can make sites like this that theoretically allow us to serve the same pages to desktop and mobile browsers. I'm curious though, is there any significant overhead to having mobile clients parse 1600+ lines of HTML, or is that a non-issue these days? Anyone have any data points on this?

Re: New Boston Globe website design

#45
post #40

The real success here is not the fluid design (which is awesome). It's getting it through inside a traditional media company. I'd love to read a frank overview of that process as well as the design itself.

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/responsive-web-design/ This looks like a good start to get the basic idea with examples on this space. Today is the first time i saw something like this and im really interested on learning it.

Ethan, the author of the RWD article, was actually on the team who worked on The Boston Globe site. He's been giving talks on the project and the process. I don't know if it is anywhere online, but it's very interesting.

Re: New Boston Globe website design

#46

It's weird, when a layout is too clean it feels like the site is fake somehow.

Very true. I've done layouts for newspapers before and I've noticed a few things:

1) White space looks wonderful, but for some reason we lend more 'serious creedance' to text that is small and crammed together.

2) Design is good to a point, but then drops off when it begins to feel 'commercial' I think after a hundred years of reading sloppily put together papers chalk full of the latest news, we sort of associate bad design with its 'genuineness' and overly clean design with something desceptive.

Re: New Boston Globe website design

#47

The real success here is not the fluid design (which is awesome). It's getting it through inside a traditional media company. I'd love to read a frank overview of that process as well as the design itself.

I agree. Responsive design itself is not difficult. But the sell must have been a difficult one. I'd love to hear it as well. My guess is it was based on a prototype. Seems everyone these days expects you to build one :-S

Re: New Boston Globe website design

#49

The real success here is not the fluid design (which is awesome). It's getting it through inside a traditional media company. I'd love to read a frank overview of that process as well as the design itself.

I agree. Responsive design itself is not difficult. But the sell must have been a difficult one. I'd love to hear it as well. My guess is it was based on a prototype. Seems everyone these days expects you to build one :-S

Having designed www.mogotix.com, which is completely responsive, I can say that fluid layouts absolutely create challenges that fixed layouts do not. That said, they're not insurmountable, and the benefits are substantial.
Post reply on HN