The Nation will get A Facelift From Obama’s Digital Design staff

The Nation, america’s oldest constantly printed weekly magazine, is a hundred and fifty years old lately and up until ultimate week, its website online at TheNation.com looked at least that old. Now, the self-described “flagship of the left” is getting a redesign, courtesy of Blue State Digital, the fellows in the back of Obama’s 2008 and 2012 digital strategies. long past is the circa-2005, tri-columned entrance web page, chronologically streaming modern and left-leaning political news at a charge of about 15 stories per day. as an alternative is something incredibly up to date—a 21st-century digital e-newsletter that looks simply as deliberately designed and laid-out as what goes to presses per week.

“for a very long time, The Nation used to be a print magazine that additionally had a web page,” says government Editor Richard Kim in a phone interview. “considering that 2010, although, we now have really grown our on-line presence to around ninety tales per week, however the website’s design never stored up with that. It gave the look of an afterthought.”

in line with Blue State Digital’s govt ingenious director Matt Ipcar, there were just a few issues the redesign needed to clear up. firstly, it had to be responsive and cellular-friendly: over 50% of TheNation.com’s day by day guests had been having access to the software on smartphones and drugs, which the website online couldn’t natively accommodate. Now it does.

It also needed to permit for editorial flexibility so The Nation’s editors had picks in the right way to staff content on the homepage. consequently, the brand new design has two dozen modules, which editors can mix-and-match to show the homepage into less of a chronological news movement and more of a dwelling magazine page.

the largest problem used to be figuring out how you can current tales in an interesting method, with out necessarily relying on full-bleed pictures to liven issues up. Ipcar points out that not like many digital publications, The Nation would not at all times have art to accompany its content material: it can be a magazine just as more likely to publish a piece with 1/2 a dozen large images as it is a three-line haiku. That intended that the brand new web page had to be typographically gorgeous. As a nod to The Nation’s print heritage, the redesign depends closely on the Mercury typeface household via Hoefler & Co. for each story headlines and bodies. First created for Esquire and the brand new occasions newspaper chains, the font was once designed to bear in mind the way that totally different humidity levels might distort a typeface, depending on the environment through which it was printed, says Ipcar. it can be not the identical typeface The Nation’s print magazine uses (even supposing that could soon follow) but it’s still meant to evoke the texture of pages hot off the press.

some other necessary intention of the redecorate used to be to raise The Nation’s archive from obscurity. “in the event you appear over our historical past, we have been fairly prescient about writing about important issues prior to they’ve transform a part of the nationwide attention,” Kim says. “however one of the problems about being prescient is that by the point everybody else is talking about it, the content’s now not in your homepage.” TheNation.com can now can simply staff prior coverage together in sidebar modules as a type of dynamic primer on scorching-button concerns, embedded proper within the text of a new article. “Our archive’s not simply this useless factor that simplest librarians are desirous about. If we write an article about local weather alternate, we will simply staff prior articles in a module, explaining to readers why they should care.”

The remodel used to be rather cheap. Kim declined to supply a specific determine, however says, “The Nation is a for-profit journal that has run at a budget deficit for 148 out of a hundred and fifty years. You higher imagine it was a shoestring.” Ipcar pegged the price range as within the “very low six figures.” (a standard redecorate for an incredible media property may cost anyplace from $250,000 to $500,000.)

but Ipcar says his company jumped on the likelihood to work on the challenge. (the truth that Kim tells me Ipcar’s wife is a Nation author most probably didn’t harm either.) “The Nation simply has so much history behind it,” Ipcar says. “it can be a journal that started publishing 10 years earlier than Custer’s ultimate Stand, a newsletter that reviewed long gone With The Wind the week it used to be revealed. Given the alignment between what we stand for and what The Nation does, we jumped on the chance to work with them.”

you could check up on the brand new design for TheNation.com here.