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New Boston Globe website design

bostonglobe.com

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Re: New Boston Globe website design

#101

Post by ghc »

sogrady wrote: post #75

The real success here - if it is successful - will be convincing readers that have previously had free (for registered users) access to Boston Globe content at Boston.com to pay $208/yr simply for the new interface. It will be the same content, with a few exceptions, simply rehosted at a new site with a new URL. If they're able to convert even a subset of their current audience over, journalists everywhere will rejoi…

I'll certainly pay. It's a lot cheaper than the paper subscription and Boston.com has a horribly design.

Re: New Boston Globe website design

#102

Post by eropple »

jgavris wrote: post #68
iKnowKungFoo wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Abrupt in what browser? Chrome doesn't feel abrupt.

yikes, bad karma, i was half joking with the negativity. good iOS apps have nice animated transitions between portrait and landscape.

I don't think media queries offer you that functionality, and I can't think of a way to do it within JavaScript. How would you do it?

Re: New Boston Globe website design

#103

Post by gjg »

This is great stuff for adapting to different screen sizes, but it's hard to see it as the perfect solution to the varying needs of different devices. It works reasonably well on mobile, but still results in a fair amount of wasted bandwidth. And some pages (looking at you, registration interstitial) serve up 150kb+ images that aren't displayed at all on mobile devices.

It may be responsive to my screen size, but it certainly isn't responsive to my data plan.

Re: New Boston Globe website design

#104

Post by braddunbar »

idonthack wrote: post #54
Adaptive wrote: post #27

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.

the designer is Ethan Marcotte, he's written a book about fluid (or as he calls it, "responsive") web design. http://www.abookapart.com/products/responsive-web-design one member of the backend dev team was posting in /r/web_design over on reddit. if you're really interested, it couldn't hurt to post a reply and ask him about things. http://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/kd2e9/boston_glo...

Ethan gave a wonderful talk including several points about this design at Converge SE (http://convergese.com/) this June.

Re: New Boston Globe website design

#105

Post by Adaptive »

pflats wrote: post #94
Adaptive wrote: post #27

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.

It's worth noting that the Boston Globe is owned by the New York Times Co. I'd be somewhat comfortable (and admittedly, somewhat hopeful) venturing a guess that they're pushing this design as some sort of skunkworks project for their bigger brands.

That's an interesting idea. I'd be surprised if this was true on the simple grounds that this kind of cross fertilization and business unit coordination is very agile and the times doesn't strike me as agile as a parent company.

BUT... if it is true it's a very canny maneuver. Again, this kind of inside view of the process (the business end of getting this through) would be great to hear about.

(are the times ad sales coordinated across BUs? this would be the big tipoff... if so then I can see the redesign being coordinate)

Re: New Boston Globe website design

#106

Post by matthewbuchanan »

joshuamerrill wrote: post #74
joshuamerrill wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Elaborating: some things that are simple in a fixed layout can become very difficult in fluid ones. Two brief examples: 1. Try embedding a YouTube video into a fluid layout. You'll need a JavaScript solution to remove the ugly black bands that will appear above and below your video. 2. IE 6-8 do not support media queries, which form the basis for fluid layouts. When we relaunched MogoTix in March 2011, I had to inclu…

Paravel and Chris Coyier released fitvids.js last week which solves the fluid video embeds issue pretty nicely (fitvidsjs.com).

Re: New Boston Globe website design

#107

Post by jgavris »

eropple wrote: post #102
jgavris wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yikes, bad karma, i was half joking with the negativity. good iOS apps have nice animated transitions between portrait and landscape.

I don't think media queries offer you that functionality, and I can't think of a way to do it within JavaScript. How would you do it?

I don't know much about javascript, I've just seen stuff like this -> http://masonry.desandro.com/demos/animating-jquery.html

Resize that page.

Re: New Boston Globe website design

#108

Post by mazuhl »

joshuamerrill wrote: post #49
freddealmeida wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How do you overcome making sure mobile devices don't download lots of images/interactive components they won't/don't/can't display?

Re: New Boston Globe website design

#109

Post by eropple »

jgavris wrote: post #107
eropple wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think media queries offer you that functionality, and I can't think of a way to do it within JavaScript. How would you do it?

I don't know much about javascript, I've just seen stuff like this -> http://masonry.desandro.com/demos/animating-jquery.html Resize that page.

Interesting trick, but I don't think (could be wrong) that's applicable in this instance. I noticed immediately that this doesn't work in the place where you're most likely to see a resize/dimensions-change event: a tablet or phone. When you switch orientation on either, it just resizes the entire page itself. So it's not super useful in the place that most needs it.

Also, though this is much more subjective, I think that really looks terrible. Too much stuff is moving.

Re: New Boston Globe website design

#110

Post by eropple »

mazuhl wrote: post #108
joshuamerrill wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How do you overcome making sure mobile devices don't download lots of images/interactive components they won't/don't/can't display?

I don't know about the person you're replying to, but I'll inject interactive components after page load (blocking them out so as not to cause reflowing, and hiding those blocks via media queries on inapplicable devices). Images, etc. are certainly trickier, I haven't found a good way to do that.
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