dummied

A Round of Applause for The Times

At a glance

This entry was written on December 30, 2005.

The entry prior to this is entitled Sticking my neck out.

The entry following this is entitled 12 dead.

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In the time I've been working as a newspaper page designer, I have increasing grown resentful of the New York Times. Everybody and their brother calls The Grey Lady one of the world's best-designed newspapers, but I look at and it looks like they're usually not even making an effort to make anything interesting for the reader's eye to follow.

The New York Times' website pre-Vinh

I realize the designs get more varied once you get past A1, but still, I look at a lot of the designs put online at News Page Designer and I fail to find the NYT well-designed at all. Incredibly well-written, but visually boring, dull and counter-productive in a world of declining newspaper readership.

That said, the Times' decision to hire Khoi Vinh, formerly of the Behavior design group and brains behind the recent redesign and web-standard-izing of The Onion, to run their mess of a web site might be the best hire they have ever made and is a tremendous step toward Getting It.

In scanning through his archives, you can tell that Vinh has already given some thought to newspaper web site design (and the Times specifically). Looking completely from the outside, I can't imagine a better hire for this specific job.

I've already held The Onion out as an example of how newspaper sites can, and should, be done. That design, and the accompanying entry about its grid design, helped me finally realize that designing for the web and designing a newspaper page don't have to be that different.

As I've mentioned before, this site is on a pretty strict grid (and oddly, a similar 12-column grid to the one my newspaper employer is currently testing). Just coming to that realization (and a few other small CSS tricks) made web design begin to suddenly flow for me. That's all thanks to Vihn and Mark Boulton's series on grids.

The Onion's web site, post-Vinh

And when you're talking about the Times, which more than any other newspaper I can think of ties its web facade with its print product (boring, cluttered, unimaginative, but refined), a grid-based design is probably going to a) be the preferred route of management and b) be the best route to go with just for the delivery of so much content.

So, congratulations to Khoi Vinh, and an enthusiastic round of applause to the New York Times.