As promised yesterday, here’s a critique from our online creative director, Stephen Edmondson, one of the finest human beings you’ll ever meet.
A Critique that the DMN Should Have Paid Stephen About $5,000 for But That They’ll Get Here for Free, Because We Care
By Stephen Edmondson
The Dallas Morning News launched a redesign of their site yesterday. The paywall isn’t up yet, but select content will ask you to register. It’s all in preparation for the switchover on February 14 where it’ll be $16.95/month for the good stuff.
The new design is an interesting one, especially for a paper that’s about to launch a paywall. If you’re going to shell out for content that was free the day before, the experience had better be near perfect. In dallasnews.com’s case, the experience is getting in the way of the content. Here’s how:
Branding. There’s a lot of real estate devoted to the dallasnews.com logo. The .com logo has been around a while but has never been given this much prominence. I don’t think it’s needed and a case could be made that it’s a bad logo. It feels dated and the type goes a bit strange. Worst of all, it’s a statement that the paper still doesn’t understand that it’s the same brand as the website. Different medium, but similar content. No need for a whole new brand.
Scale. Use of scale in design is something the paper does very well. Pick up a copy and revel in the layout of each page. No one understands this better than a newspaper designer. Headline sizes, column widths, image choice and size. These things help your eye know what’s important and differentiate one story from another. This is where the DMN might have done the most damage with the redesign. My eyes don’t know where to go. When looking at the top story, I see the photo credit before I see the caption. Sections run together. The white space between modules isn’t big enough to be comfortable, and the light blue dividers don’t divide when they’re the same color as the hyperlinks. This would have been acceptable years ago, but modern users deserve more credit.
Type. The type treatments don’t help things. The majority of the links on the page are of the text variety. With the ratio of light blue links to other stuff, the other stuff ends up standing out more than the links. There’s nary a bold, capitalization, or any other type emphasis to be found. Within a story, the point size is too small for comfortable reading. I see the text size controls, but why not start with a more readable size to begin with? A serif would help readability as well.
Community Pages. One of the most difficult things for a newspaper site is wrangling community. You have cities’ worth of users coming to a site, and it has to serve them all reasonably well. On dallasnews.com, there’s not much happening on the subpages in terms of specific treatments. The restaurant page has one image, and instead of having an icon for the star ratings, “2 stars” is spelled out. The only standout I see are the sports pages. Guessing someone on the web team is either a sports fan, or dallasnews.com gets a big share of its traffic from sports. I’ll attribute it to Evan Grant.
As Tim said, we live in a glass house. But the success of Dallas’ only daily paper impacts us all — whether you’re in the media biz or someone who wants a reasonable experience when reading the news in 2011. Especially if you have to pay for it. I had really hoped for more.
