Heri

Since working on montrealtechwatch, I’ve kept an eye on how media websites present their content, and how they deal with the dilemma of quantity of information vs usability & readibility.

I especially like the Guardian‘s layout. It’s a generous design, with lots of white space, nice typography, with a good balance between iconography and text. But the thing that pleases me most is that it’s really a web-native interface, one built from the ground up to take advantage of the strenghts of the Internet – and try to minimize its weaknesses.

I could list what they have done, but for the sake of simplicity, here is just one detail.

See it? Headlines starts exactly at the same line, even though they are on two different columns. It’s the same for the features below, they “magically” match withouth discordance. Of course, the Guardian hasn’t invented it; grids & baselines are avalaible to everyone thanks to frameworks like CSS blueprint.

Of course, the design is not perfect. You could argue for instance that the design lacks personality and dynamism. Here’s then rue89 another media website that convey personality while still keeping a great user interface. Rue89 uses a distinctive red color for highlighting, black lettering, high contrast, and headlines that “scream”.

The bold typography and distinctive graphic design is suited for their writing style, which is caustic, unapologetic, un-politically correct, although still with lots of original information and thourough investigation.

Like in the Guardian’s case, Rue89 manages to pack and present lots of information to the user, while still maintaining hierarchy (what’s the most important news of the day?), readibility, usability, and also shortcuts to special sections and features for power users.

As a sidenote, it’s interesting to know that the original rue89 team were ex-reporters from lemonde interfactif, making them a web-native media website, where readers can comment, vote, and send over news and pictures.