LJWorld redesign
So for the past five months or so we’ve been working on a redesign for the Lawrence Journal-World. For those of you that don’t know, it’s a daily newspaper that circulates the town of Lawrence, Kansas. It’s quite small compared to surrounding markets which makes it very agile and free from shareholders and their evil agendas.
I had a feeling this project would be special and challenging but I had no idea of the scale. Turns out, around the same time I was tasked with designing Marketplace, a directory of 4000+ local businesses. I must also mention, news doesn’t stop for redesigns. It’s definitely a juggling act when your trying to complete a site thats constantly having to push out news features and various timely events like local elections. There were, shall I say, growing pains.
Details aside, the design is simple. In fact the design is designed to disappear. Content is what really matters so I decided to take an approach that would make the overall design feel supportive rather than overbearing. This isn’t easy for anyone and requires extreme discipline. Discipline I never thought I had.
The site will continue to take shape over time. We’re hoping that redesigns are a thing of the past and constant iterations are a thing of the future. We’ll see how long that lasts ;-)
This project wouldn’t have been possible without the involvement of James Bennett, Dan Cox, Jeff Croft, Matt Croydon, Jacob Kaplan-Moss, Joel Mathis, Christian Metts, David Ryan, Tom Tobin, all the web producers and all the editors and reporters that allow us to do what we do.
Remarks
Xian http://mintchaos.com
Booya! It’s good, and it’s only going to get better. It’s been a pleasure working on it with you.
Nathan Borror http://www.playgroundblues.com
You too Christian. It wouldn’t have been possible without you.
Oliver http://www.obeattie.com
That redesign… it’s too sexy! Super-über-well-done to the entire team!
Respiro, the logo design guy http://www.relogodesign.com
Nathan, I just read your project description, visited ljworld.com and it seems that you work/worked [?] on a huge project. I understand that you took care about the design part. What about programming? You have/had a helping hand? I am wondering, how much time will take/took you to finish this project? I presume that there’s somewhere at 4-6 month or even so… I would be interested in knowing more about this project.
Nathan Borror http://www.playgroundblues.com
@Respiro - I lead the design with help from Jeff Croft and Christain Metts and the programming was handled by our very skilled programming team. As I said above, the project took around five months to complete. This timeline would have been shorter if we’d been able to focus just on the redesign and not had to deal with as much context switching due to the nature of news and another project I was working on called Marketplace.
Since the site had already been using Django (http://www.djangoproject.com) and Ellington (http://www.ellingtoncms.com) the majority of the work was re-factoring the templates and flushing out the new look. Thats not to say there wasn’t a fair share of programming but since we have a clear separation of presentation and data we are able to achieve a complete face lift without changing the “brain” of LJWorld.
Hope that answers your question.
Respiro Media http://www.respiromedia.com
Nathan, thank you for the details! Knowing that the project took 5 month and it needed 3 designers’ + a programming team’s input, I am wondering what was the budget?… You can let me know via e-mail, if you don’t want to go public… ;)
Olav http://bjorkoy.com
Nathan, the new design looks amazing, and it’s inspiring to see how a large newspaper dare make these in many ways “leaps of faithâ€. Keep it up, I’m sure the new site will uphold your winning streak of awards.
And by the way, the design of your blog is quite inspiring as well. Subscribed. ;)
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