Comments on: The Lab’s new look: A quick tour of our new redesign https://www.niemanlab.org/2011/08/the-labs-new-look-a-quick-tour-of-our-new-redesign/ Wed, 31 Aug 2011 12:36:00 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.2 By: Anonymous https://www.niemanlab.org/2011/08/the-labs-new-look-a-quick-tour-of-our-new-redesign/comment-page-1/#comment-283581 Wed, 31 Aug 2011 12:36:00 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=46047#comment-283581 http://tinyurl.com/3tnmjr8

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By: Martin Langeveld https://www.niemanlab.org/2011/08/the-labs-new-look-a-quick-tour-of-our-new-redesign/comment-page-1/#comment-283268 Wed, 24 Aug 2011 16:25:00 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=46047#comment-283268 To note an offsite discussion of this topic:
http://metatalk.metafilter.com/20934/Accessibility-vs-access
wherein Josh Benton appears as “crabwalk”.

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By: Joshua Benton https://www.niemanlab.org/2011/08/the-labs-new-look-a-quick-tour-of-our-new-redesign/comment-page-1/#comment-283261 Wed, 24 Aug 2011 13:26:00 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=46047#comment-283261 In reply to Reed Reibstein.

Fixed! Tweaked the J/o and the a/b the most — you can compare the difference:

http://www.niemanlab.org/wordpress/wp-content/themes/Labby/resources/niemanlab-logo-kerning-compare.png

(Top is old, bottom is new.)

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By: Joshua Benton https://www.niemanlab.org/2011/08/the-labs-new-look-a-quick-tour-of-our-new-redesign/comment-page-1/#comment-283260 Wed, 24 Aug 2011 13:11:00 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=46047#comment-283260 In reply to Reed Reibstein.

Good eye! Old: http://www.niemanlab.org/layout/nieman_flag.gif New: http://www.niemanlab.org/wordpress/wp-content/themes/Labby/resources/newfront-niemanlab-biglogo.png Not sure how that happened — I thought both were prepared the same way in PS, but I’ll check it out.

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By: Martin Langeveld https://www.niemanlab.org/2011/08/the-labs-new-look-a-quick-tour-of-our-new-redesign/comment-page-1/#comment-283258 Wed, 24 Aug 2011 12:14:00 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=46047#comment-283258 In reply to Joshua Benton.

I do use RSS via Google reader, but the Nieman Wire is nice! Thanks!

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By: Martin Langeveld https://www.niemanlab.org/2011/08/the-labs-new-look-a-quick-tour-of-our-new-redesign/comment-page-1/#comment-283257 Wed, 24 Aug 2011 12:14:00 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=46047#comment-283257 In reply to Joshua Benton.

I do use RSS via Google reader, but the Nieman Wire is nice! Thanks!

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By: Reed Reibstein https://www.niemanlab.org/2011/08/the-labs-new-look-a-quick-tour-of-our-new-redesign/comment-page-1/#comment-283238 Wed, 24 Aug 2011 05:17:00 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=46047#comment-283238 Really like the new design, especially the Twitter highlights. My one gripe is with the logo — the letterspacing is very uneven. Maybe this was also an issue with the logo on the previous site and I didn’t notice, but the distance between the “a” and “b” in “Lab” definitely grew since then.

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By: Joshua Benton https://www.niemanlab.org/2011/08/the-labs-new-look-a-quick-tour-of-our-new-redesign/comment-page-1/#comment-283220 Tue, 23 Aug 2011 19:48:00 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=46047#comment-283220 In reply to Martin Langeveld.

Hey Martin — the specific issue you mention, looking for older Links on Twitter posts, will go away soon as the Links on Twitter posts get replaced with something better. Was hoping to have that ready for launch but didn’t — look for it in the next week or two. Everything on the front page actually is in reverse chronological order, with the exception of the featured-art slot on the top left — everything else is in order (most recent middle column top, then flowing down that col, then the right col, then to the cols below Fuego).

While you do lose something by not going bloggy and having the big excerpts we had on the old design, the downside of that is that a post a day old would be something like 3-4-5 screenfuls down the page as other stuff got pushed in on top of it. (Some of it stuff like Links on Twitter, which was always kind of awkwardly shoveled in — I hated it that a LoT post would be the top thing on the site through every evening/night and all weekend, just because it was the last thing we posted during the day.)

(FYI, re: the green bars, they’re on posts less than 24 hours old.)

You may not have found the LoT posts via search because the default now is sort-by-relevance, not sort-by-date (which is the WordPress default). You can choose sort-by-date by clicking the button at the top of search results. 

Basically, part of my thinking was to deemphasize chronology on the front page because so many of the people for whom that would matter a lot follow us on Twitter or subscribe to our daily email or pull our RSS — they’ve got their own delivery mechanism set up. We get so much of our traffic through those channels (only ~8-10% of visits start at the homepage) that I wanted to see if we could please a different/complementary audience with a more magazine-y, skimmable approach. We’ll see!

Actually, just for you (and others like you!), I just whipped up Nieman Lab Wire, a Times Wire-inspired reverse-chron page:

http://www.niemanlab.org/wire/

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By: Joshua Benton https://www.niemanlab.org/2011/08/the-labs-new-look-a-quick-tour-of-our-new-redesign/comment-page-1/#comment-283216 Tue, 23 Aug 2011 19:24:00 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=46047#comment-283216 In reply to Mac Slocum.

Hey Mac, thanks! Yeah, we’d been manually doing excerpts for our daily email newsletter, but switching the mental model from excerpts to decks (that is, from summarizing/taking a chunk of the lede to making it something more valuable/complementary to the headline) makes it more valuable, I think. I just added Deck as a new custom field in WordPress.

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By: Joshua Benton https://www.niemanlab.org/2011/08/the-labs-new-look-a-quick-tour-of-our-new-redesign/comment-page-1/#comment-283215 Tue, 23 Aug 2011 19:22:00 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=46047#comment-283215 In reply to Martin Hoffmann.

There’ll be lots of good Fuego-related stuff in the coming days/weeks, and yes, we’ll have both an RSS feed and a couple of dedicated views to Fuego, both real-time and archival. Stay tuned!

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By: Joshua Benton https://www.niemanlab.org/2011/08/the-labs-new-look-a-quick-tour-of-our-new-redesign/comment-page-1/#comment-283214 Tue, 23 Aug 2011 19:21:00 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=46047#comment-283214 In reply to Jonathan Warren.

Thanks for the reminder re: left pullquotes — I’d actually fixed that on mobile devices, but something I did over the weekend broke it again. I’ll fix that.

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By: Martin Langeveld https://www.niemanlab.org/2011/08/the-labs-new-look-a-quick-tour-of-our-new-redesign/comment-page-1/#comment-283213 Tue, 23 Aug 2011 19:18:00 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=46047#comment-283213 The “look” is nice, but can I be contrarian? I liked reverse chron. I could easily scan back to wherever I left off. Now, I have to go to Archives even to read some of yesterday’s stuff. I was looking for two recent installments of “Links on Twitter” — none of them were on the front page; searching with or without quotes failed to bring them up, and in Archives it’s three clicks deep. Also, on page one there are no dates. Some stories have a green box showing elapsed time, but others don’t, so I have no idea how recent those things are. Dates would be preferable, on all items. Could you at least keep the iPhone app chronological?   

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By: Mac Slocum https://www.niemanlab.org/2011/08/the-labs-new-look-a-quick-tour-of-our-new-redesign/comment-page-1/#comment-283196 Tue, 23 Aug 2011 13:36:00 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=46047#comment-283196 I dig the new look! Lots of lovely whitespace. And while I know subheads/excerpts are a pain, they really are useful.

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By: Lyn Headley https://www.niemanlab.org/2011/08/the-labs-new-look-a-quick-tour-of-our-new-redesign/comment-page-1/#comment-283179 Mon, 22 Aug 2011 19:31:00 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=46047#comment-283179 This looks really great.  I’m glad to see you moving away from reverse chronological to something that gives the reader more clues about what to look at and why.

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By: Martin Hoffmann https://www.niemanlab.org/2011/08/the-labs-new-look-a-quick-tour-of-our-new-redesign/comment-page-1/#comment-283177 Mon, 22 Aug 2011 14:44:00 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=46047#comment-283177 Congratulations from Germany, the new Nieman Lab looks really stunning to me! Very well done. Only one small question: Is there any way to get the Fuego-links as a RSS-Feed? Would be so useful! Thanks for your help – and keep up the good work.

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By: Jonathan Warren https://www.niemanlab.org/2011/08/the-labs-new-look-a-quick-tour-of-our-new-redesign/comment-page-1/#comment-283176 Mon, 22 Aug 2011 14:35:00 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=46047#comment-283176 I like it, but all uppercase on tags is yucky and pullquotes floated to the left flow off the page on smaller browser windows.

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