September 1, 2011 in design, Redesigns, Websites
The Daily Nebraskan at the University of Nebraska has refreshed their design for the new year. Here’s what the site looks like today:
And here’s what it looked like in February, 2011 (via archive.org):
I like the addition of more graphics “above the fold” to draw viewers into the stories. Also, the “flag” tones down the red somewhat. What do you think?
December 9, 2010 in College Media, design, innovation, showcase
By Rich Cameron
Cerritos College Mass Communications chair
The Dec. 8 issue of the Cerritos College Talon Marks will stand out from other issues of the paper, in more ways than one if you are wearing 3D glasses. That’s because four pages in the paper sported color 3D photos. To aid the readers in seeing the photos pop out at them, each of the 4,000 copies of the paper had a free pair of 3D glasses affixed to it.
The 3D experiment is the brainchild of Talon Marks editor Joey Berumen. (editor@talonmarks.com). In his front page column on the experiment he says, “With the recent revitalization of 3D movies, video games and even TVs, it seems the next logical step would be for newspapers and other forms of media to follow suit.”
Elsewhere he adds, “Other than running three dimensional photos, how else can newspapers utilize the technology? Perhaps the cornerstone of the print media –advertising– can hold some of the answers. After all, a 3D Victoria Secret advertisement wouldn’t be eye-catching at all, would it?”
Ironically, the paper includes a color ad that unintentionally sports 3D aspects because of its color scheme: an unexpected boon for the advertiser.
A pdf of the entire issue is available for download on the www.talonmarks.com website. You can view it online here.
To accomplish the project the students first had to learn new PhotoShop skills to convert 2D photos into 3D.
Then they had to find a suitable subject. Originally, the students settled on a campus art show photo page. The show consists of a number of sculptures and mixed media that lent themselves to 3D photo presentations, but as the students found the conversion easier and easier to do, photos on all four planned color pages (thanks to advertisers wanting color) the project spread to other photos.
Then the students had to locate and talk their faculty adviser into authorizing purchase of 4,000 pairs of inexpensive CMYK compatible 3D glasses (they make RGB versions, too). When the paper returned from the printer, an assembly line of students was needed to affix the glasses to each copy of the paper before distribution could take place.
Why do it? Well, there are the editor’s words above. Clearly it was a gimmick designed to get campus attention; getting it for something good/interesting is far better than getting it for bad reasons. And who knows, it may attract future readers/staff members.
For the staff members it is something for pride, but they’ve also learned new PhotoShop skills. While they may never be called on to repeat them, the fact that they 1) thought outside the box, and 2) had to learn new skill sets to accomplish their idea clearly were good reasons to do it.
If they ever do it again, they will work harder to get an advertiser to pay for it. They only half-heartedly tried this time, for instance, to find an advertiser who would buy an ad on the glasses themselves and charge enough to buy the glasses.
In another innovation this semester, the Talon Marks started including QR scan codes in its print edition that help readers with smart phones connect to audio and video multimedia pieces on the newspaper’s website.
August 31, 2010 in College Media, design, Redesigns, Websites
The Daily Bruin just launched a new version of their site now using the Gryphon CMS from DetroitSoftworks.
Here’s the new design:
Here’s a screencap from Aug. 31, right before the switch:
And here’s an ancient screen cap from 2007 (file image):
August 30, 2010 in College Media, design, Redesigns, Websites
Jim Killam sends along word about the redesign of the Northern Star at Northern Illinois.
Here’s the new look:
And here’s what the site looked like a couple of years ago (most recent version I have):
In addition to the redesign, the Northern Star is now using TownNews as a CMS. Previously, they had a homegrown CMS solution.
August 26, 2010 in College Media, design, Redesigns, Websites
Onward State is an online-only publication for Penn State. Publisher Davis Shaver sends along news of their redesign for the new school year. “Major new features include community posting capabilities, community member profiles, and topic pages,” Shaver wrote in an e-mail.
Here’s the old design:
And here’s the new design:
More news above the fold, more graphics, and a lighter color scheme, along with the features mentioned above.
August 24, 2010 in College Media, design, Redesigns, Websites
New school year, new site designs. Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be sharing screenshots of some of the online college news sites that have put on a new coat of digital pixie dust. If your media outlet has redesigned the web presence over the summer, drop me an e-mail at scmurley -at- gmail.com to be included in the coverage.
First up in the box, the Boise State Arbiter. The Arbiter last redesigned when they moved off the College Publisher CMS in 2009. Here’s the earlier redesign:
And here’s the new redesign:
The new design looks clean. Fewer rounded corners, a little less blue, and I like that they’ve pushed more news to the top of the page with the addition of the middle rail of stories, while also focusing more attention on the main photo carousel as well.
What do you think? Feel free to comment below.
July 12, 2010 in College Media News, design, Websites
As part of my summer inbox clean-up, I’m posting about some “old” news from Kent State. In January, Kent State’s student media redesigned, migrated and renamed their web presence, according to an e-mail from student media adviser Susan Kirkman Zake.
The new URL for the former KentNewsNet is Kentwired.com, which is much easier to remember than the old URL. The site is now running on the Joomla! (yes, that stupid exclamation mark is in the name, just like Yahoo!) CMS, which is the CMS that runs UT-Arlington’s Shorthorn.
From Zake’s e-mail:
Our contract with College Publisher expired at the end of the year, and we thought it was a good time to retool and expand our growth opportunities with a new content management system. While KentNewsNet had a dedicated following, and high traffic within the CP system, it was not as appealing to students as we had hoped, so we’re working to give the new site a broader content footprint.
We’re using Joomla! for our content management system along with a RocketTheme template called Mixxmagg. We’ve been adapting modules as needed — the site is more graphically driven than KentNewsNet, which has been challenging, but feedback has been generally favorable.
We’re hosting the site on the Rackspace cloud, which has been really good so far, and can adapt to our needs if our traffic spikes up, as it did last year — to 60K page views one day — during a spring riot on campus.
Our biggest challenge has been finding a solution for email marketing of the site. Since Rackspace only allows 250 emails per hour, it wasn’t a good solution for our breaking news updates, so we’re working to take our subscriber list off site and use an outside email marketing provider, probably Mad Mimi.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a screencap from what the old KentNewsNet site looked like before the redesign.
If anyone has other suggestions for subscriber list management, drop them in the comments. I’m sure other student media advisers are interested in the topic as well.
August 27, 2009 in design, industry news, Websites
It must be the slow days of summer that bring the fresh paint, as a number of news sites have unveiled redesigns over the past month. The thing is, they’re all becoming more alike!
Here are some who’ve undergone a redesign that appeared recently:
The new NPR web site features a 3-column split on the first screen, a large, black nav bar across the top (a nod to an older demographic, perhaps?), lots of photos as you go down the page, and serif headlines and sans-serif body copy. You can read more about the redesign and NPR’s new digital strategy here.
The Tribune’s new site uses the real Chicago Tribune flag font, and has a lot more white space. But as you’ll see from the next site, it’s not terribly original. (ignore the wide ad that appears in the screengrab above. If you visit the Trib site, it’s not there. There’s also a breaking news story today that has changed the top story layout somewhat.)
Like the Tribune site, the Times’ new site is loaded with white space and a lot of graphics on the front page. The top of the page is clean and readable. As you scroll down past that, you see it looks very much like a WordPress magazine theme. It also looks a lot like the Tribune site with a few font and color differences.
The Trib and the Times are both owned by the Tribune Co., which has been doing its best to consolidate parts of the news product in order to get out of bankruptcy. It makes sense that they’d try to consolidate some of the design elements of their flagship papers.
Naples Daily News – Perhaps the most “out-of-the-box” redesign comes from the Daily News, which features a black background on the first screen. How many professional news sites do you know that do that? The organization is cleaner than the Times/Tribune design, as the sections are horizontally organized as you scroll down the page.
UPDATE:
After posting this, a couple more examples came my way.
Annarbor.com – This is the web site that remains after the Ann Arbor, MI News was shut down last month. I confess I never looked at the annarbor.com site before the paper was shut down. Of all these sites, it’s the simplest, with the most white space, a two-column layout with a right nav bar that really looks like a community weblog. (thanks to @captainia on Twitter for the heads up
Newsday – I saw the newsday.com redesign sometime this summer, and, as “bludrop” noted in the comments, it is the most “radically different” redesign I’ve seen so far, even outpacing the Naples News site. The entire site has a deep blue background, with white text. I admit it’s a colorful and pretty well organized front page, although I’m generally not a fan of light text on a dark background in large quantities. Another interesting thing to note is how few ads there are on the page at present. There’s an ad in the header, and an ad on the second screen, and an ad strip at the bottom of the page.
END UPDATE
I wrote about the demise of the left nav bar way back in 2007. With these redesigns, plus the numerous redesigns I’m seeing on college news sites these days, it appears the left nav bar is finally being buried for good.
But that raises another quandary: Top nav sites are beginning to look very similar. With colleges some of this can be blamed on similar magazine-style templates, especially those who are moving to WordPress. Change a few colors and fonts in the CSS, and a single theme can be used across numerous sites.
I don’t think this is so much of an issue for college news site readers, who won’t necessarily be looking at numerous college news sites. They tend to go to their alma mater’s site exclusively most of the time.
But for college webmasters and editors, that could be more of an issue. And for professional news sites, it will become an issue at some point (I wonder what the folks at the Trib and L.A. Times think about their kissing-cousin front pages?).
I don’t have a solution (look for different magazine-style templates?). But I am glad more sites are going to top nav front page designs. Top nav designs look much better than the old left navs, and push more news up to the top of the page.
April 21, 2008 in design, industry news
You’d think a company valued at $15 BILLION could afford to hire someone to design a document for them. But you’d be wrong. Facebook just released “The Insider’s Guide to Viral Marketing” as a PDF document (see the document at TechCrunch). I haven’t looked at the content yet, but the design stinks.
The cover is a plain page with a headline at the top. No effort whatsoever into making the first page appealing. I suppose people will just see the word “Viral Marketing” and want to read this tome.
And, there are no screenshots. If you’re going to talk about applications and specific pages on your web site, it’s helpful to have screenshots of what those pages look like. Not everyone likes to read page after page of instruction text.
Beyond that, the font is Times New Roman (for headlines and body text – exceedingly mundane) and the formatting reeks of “hurry up and get it out the door.” (the info screen for the PDF says it was produced in Microsoft Word – a sure sign of design quality /snark).
As a for instance, take this page:
Notice the topic subhead “Events.” It’s at the bottom of the page, all by itself. Where’s the information? It’s on the next page, of course. Why not put the subhead with the information?
And since this is a PDF, you’d think they could make the URL hyperlinks actually work, but they didn’t even bother with that.
I’m sure someone will tell me it’s a “white paper,” which must mean that it has to be ugly. Sorry, I don’t buy it. Spend a couple of bucks for a decent page designer to make your documents look like you actually thought about the people you’re inflicting them on.
