Here's a band name that could be a self-fulfilling prophecy: Hold Music.
AdAge.com redesign gets job done
Jeffrey Zeldman announced his studio's redesign of the Advertising Age Web site.
Zeldman literally wrote the book on standards-based Web design, and I'm an unabashed fan.
I like the boldness of the new, much larger Ad Age logo. I like the colors and typographical choices overall -- while recognizing we're all still working with the "compatibility" palette containing only a handful of browser fonts. Basically, for Web designers, it's down to sticking your finger up in the air and seeing which way the font wind blows ("Hmm, feels like a Trebuchet breeze today ...").
On the down side, I'm not sure I find the new AdAge.com layout particularly cohesive, especially in the spacing of HTML typography. Part of the problem may be good ol' copy editing quirks within a database content management system. But things like headlines and summaries that kick over an extra line, or unbalanced spacing of the Georgia-font text elements in the left rail, make me wonder if something's being thrown into the formatting that Zeldman's team didn't intend.
Also, the body text of articles appears to be a darkish gray instead of true black. That might look great on a Windows machine with an LCD display and ClearType set just right. But I'm not lovin' it on any of the computers I've checked so far. Mac displays, especially, seem to exacerbate the lack of contrast. But that's just my eyes, folks; judge for yourselves.
On balance, the design gets the job done. Ad Age also expanded content to include pretty much everything you can get in the print edition -- so part of the purpose of the new design is to make it easier to navigate that additional stuff. It definitely works for that.
After reading their article,
After reading their article, Welcome to Our New website, I find the most interesting change to be the shift from "AdAge.com" branding, to using their standard "Advertising Age" name.
We tried this at kansan.com, over the winter, but quickly stumbled into a roadblock:
How would we promote our new website from within the print product? Referencing "The University Daily Kansan Online Edition" or something similar would be quite a mouthful (not to mention abusive to the column-inches of the paper).
We'd like our print and online products to be considered the same brand, but at this point the closest we've come has been moving our "kansan.com" logo into the same typeface as our print masthead.
Good point. You'd have
Good point. You'd have another problem, too, if you tried to change the actual domain name (Advertising Age did not).
It's really, REALLY hard to rebrand and redirect a site in a way that search engines and your visitors can handle well -- that is, without awful redirect pages, busted bookmarks or search engines that still point to the wrong canonical URL.
I think kansan.com gets the job done better anyway.