In doing some research for a site I’m working on I’ve been looking closely at a lot of newspaper and magazine websites. While I’ve seen most of them before, and always felt they were poorly designed, I’ve been newly astounded by how bad they look and why.
Check out: The New York Times, The Washington Post, LA Times, Chicago Sun Times
I realize the web designers and information architects don’t have control over the plethora of ads that plaster the homepages and make my eyes sore. That said, the non-advertising elements also suffer from a total disregard for consistency: dozens of different fonts, sizes and type treatments; totally inconsistent margins and whitespace treatments on different elements; ignorance of the grid and for relationships between elements; extreme proliferation of rules and lines (this, I think, is carried over from the print world); and general lack of attention to detail. (And don’t even bother looking at the markup.)
There are a few exceptions, of course. The Onion’s recent redesign has been much talked about already. Also, I found The Nation’s website to be a bastion of elegant simplicity and consistency in a sea of garish weeklies: The New Yorker, New York, The Economist, and I could go on.
Why are news sites so bad? Do they not bother hiring designers for their online ventures, or does it have something to do with bureaucracy and management? Since many of the publications look good in print, I find the discrepancy horrifyingly fascinating.
Khoi Vinh Says:
December 13th, 2005 at 11:26 am
There are lots of reasons why news design is generally so flawed online. One of the most conspicuous is the still evolving economic framework. The first decade or so of robust online news offerings has taught consumers that, though we may have to pay a quarter for a copy of the physical paper, the news we get online should be always free. This is causing a lot of pain throughout the industry, and it doesn’t contibute much, in many news organizations, to the case for hiring more robust, more capable design staffs.
As I said though, that’s just one of the challenges, but there are others, too, like continued general ambivalence as to how a paper should be translated to the Web, the complexity of editorial workflow, legacy design orthodoxies, multiple competing internal constituencies… the list goes on.
It’s not exaggerating to say that, as far as Web design goes, the area of online news design is one of the most complex a designer could deal with today. Online newspapers are applications of an entirely different breed than the applications that generally benefit from design best practices, and the disparity shows.
Chris Johanesen » Blog Archive » More about newspaper sites Says:
December 28th, 2005 at 1:42 pm
[…] Kirk McElhearn muses on why newspaper website are so bad. While he is talking about usability more than visual design he has a very good point about the browsability of newspaper sites: […]