Our latest design is by Danielle LeDesma,
who I've had the pleasure of working with in a professional capacity
over the last many years. I count it a coup that GUD could afford (in
trade) her services, and hope that the latest design better reflects
the professionalism and feel of the actual magazine, and of "this
outfit" as a whole.
There's still chunks of the site that need massaging (and some areas
will get some restructuring along with the redesign), but I found it
was easiest to just get the basic overhaul up and worry about tweaks as
I get the chance. We've been working towards this design since late
November, with many revisions put on the table and scrapped. It's
probably not as exciting for you as it is for us--user interface
tends to be a more subconscious thing for site users--but I hope that
the design makes for an easier landscape for using the site.
The page that got the most focus to start was the homepage. We've
put the current issue front and center--a brief blurb about it, a
flavor image, an excerpt from the current issue--this is where the eye
will go first. Messaging about GUD in general comes under that, along
with Previous Issues, which is actually a tough thing to brand. We're
trying to push not only the current issue but every issue we've
published, and it's constantly a tough line to find; especially as one
of the things we're trying to push as one of our differences is that
we're trying to publish content that will _last_, and as part of that
we intend for no issue to ever go out of print. If the magazine takes
off, we'll be paying royalities to our contributors and their heirs...
The areas of the template that mark the most striking change, other
than the color scheme and textures as a whole, are the menu (now a
vertical menu in the top right; with fewer and hopefully clearer
options) and the sidebar (which presents the news and reviews more
front and center). The sidebar's messaging will grow over time to be
more specific to various areas of the site (for now it's only different
in the actual news and reviews sections).
This marks three designs for three issues, which is a lot
considering what goes into it. We spent six months before launching
the business/site tinkering with various design ideas, and we went
through several dozen variations of visual theme/color schemes/layouts
before settling on what, in retrospect, was the horror-style design for
the site. Simplicity was the driving force of this idea, as it was
with the layout of the actual magazine. We achieved that with the
magazine beautifully, I think, thanks to Sue Miller's work on it, but
web design (as opposed to development) was neither of our fortes.
Somehow we went astray from that goal for the website itself.
The craziest part of the website was that while I knew splashscreens
were abominations, I thought I knew how to make one better. We reduced
our homepage to just the menu and a tiny splash of information. Slowly
the information that we wanted to push to the splash screen grew into
being a homepage all on its own, and eventually we scrapped it and
restructured the homepage accordingly.
I couldn't really say how the horror aspect of things leaked into
it. We're not a horror mag, per se; we're multi-genre, non-genre,
slipstream, what-have-you. But somewhere along the process the black
background slipped in, and things just went from there. I think
originally the black background was supposed to be reflecting a
coffee-shop manifesto style, which was somewhere back in our
brainstorming, but got let go over time towards a more "Show it don't
say it" line of reasoning.
The clouds design, then, was in reaction to that. Every time I'd
show someone the site, in person, I'd find myself saying, "But we're
not a horror magazine". And I never really had a good explanation for
why the site didn't look different. So I approached the site with the
thought of making something lighter, more neutral. I hadn't divorced
entirely from the light text on dark content, and I really liked the
faux transparency effect of the almost-imperceptibly-dark bullets on
the lighter bullets of the original. Somehow clouds came up, and
having effectively a tri-color site (blue left, white stripe, hazy
right) seemed like a good way of showing our range. Having the horizon
askew, implicitly 90 degrees from things, was in part intended to make
the point that we were different.
Different doesn't necessarily mean better, though, and while the
design did escape from the horror feel, it was still harder on the eyes
and mind than I wanted. Menu placement was a problem, and the content
area of the page became painfully cluttered without clear demarcations
between the content-content and the sidebar content. I had to make the
font large to make it easy enough to read on the background; and due to
CSS clutter and the organic growth of this design in my spare time,
there were inconsistencies all over the site. I was fairly proud of a
few elements--the main title with the BUY NOW sticker hanging off the
top, for instance. But as a whole it was not an easy site to read or
navigate.
So on to version three--I'm sure it will have its own share of
problems, and maybe there will be another retrospective, in time. I'd
love to hear what you think. :)
