New York Times Spend A Year And Millions Of Dollars In Disasterous Redesign Effort

Elaine Meinel Supkis

The New York Times spent millions of dollars and had a committee work on their website and they turned it into a nearly impossible to look at mess as far as I am concerned. But then, prehaps one should be happy there is less competition? I love the BBC web site. Easy to read, even from across a room, easy to navigate. They are my role model.

Here is the new New York Times. They lost the ugly orange "Times Select" side stuff, confining it to merely small orange boxes but everything else is terrible here.

For example, the top photo is photo sized but underneath is tiny text that doesn't even fill the space there and it is jammed together with no spaces so one has to squint to see which story is which. Instead of making the photos square like the BBC or I do, they make it photo sized and this now crushes the side bar that has other, non-picture stories. The BBC has a small picture with all the top rank stories and one bigger but not too big picture illustrating the biggest story of the day. One can see all ten of them easily at a glance and clicking on the stories is easier since they each have their own icon and box with a good amount of white space around each one, isolating it from the others, visually.

The Times has everything crowded together. The Washington Post used to do that. All the stories crammed in so one couldn't see anything, it is still way too crowded on the front page. The "stuff it all in the very first click" is not worthy of great papers. Are they scared people won't make a second click? Heck, at my pathetic, lousy little blog, all my readers click through because they know there is something more than the headlines and if nothing else, they want to see my scribbled cartoons.

Having no staff, no editor, no nothing, just one female and her cats and dogs, this blog slogs on, trying to be readable, at least. Many blogs are hideously ugly or totally unreadable. Some sites may be popular due to content despite incredible ugliness. The Brad Blog is an example of a blog with funny or interesting content which had to been designed by a color-blind person. Gah. Of course, these "throw in the artistic kitchen sink" blogs are run by nonprofessionals and the cobbled-together, patchwork, "oooh, I can do anything" look is what characterizes many popular enterprises. This is normal, in other words, to throw everything into a visual blender and then turn on to the highest chopping rate.

But the NYT has no excuse for a visual disaster area! They write about aesthetics all the time and are obviously proud of being culturally attuned and know-it-alls about what looks good, what is fashionable and what we should emulate and they pop on this silly stuff? The typeface is very old fashioned so why did they try to be "computer hip" with setting it up? Namely, Helvica or Trebuchet can be underlined and stacked in rather tight piles but Courier?

No way. The fussy tags and curves make it look frilly and jumbled. Underlined, it looks like trying to tie together the hair of a very curly-haired child. If one uses frusty, dusty type, one must give the eye some room to see what the words are. Of course, we are fortunate they aren't using Gothic German type like the Medieval typeface of their logo.

Instead of crowding everything into the front page, the BBC has a select, single story from each section with a picture and then you visit it to see the other stories. At the bottom of the front page is a three story each sub-selection without pictures. One can choose from that, too, but I seldom scan it, prefering to go to the sub sections and reading the headlines that go with pictures, there. Clicking through is much easier than scrolling through a massive front page!

Web design is still in its infancy. Many corporate websites look like each other and most are pretty yuckky. Either very crowded or too empty, the aesthetics of web design are still mostly tech people rather than artists and artists haven't digested the restrictions and strengths of web design so it is pure chaos out there and everything goes like when Victorian architecture could slap anything and everything together in a total mishmash of whatever. This produced a lot of funny and amusing housing which I love to play around with but it also was a mess.

Many of the websites born during the internet revolution will fade into the past and might amuse future readers but it is dismaying that bad design, rather then getting less and less, seems to be growing greater. I have been using the net for many years and we went through a period, after the bare minimum look of the earliest years, at about 1996 to 1999, many web sites became both easy to use and easy on the eyes. Then the number of goodies one could use grew and grew as both computer power expanded and connections improved. Now many sites are a real pain in the ass to look at with the flashing ads, moving frames, intrusive colors, multiple backgrounds, letters imposed on pictures, etc, etc.

I hate reading stuff where I have to cover my eyes part of the time or slide the screen around to hide half of the page, etc, etc. My annoyance with this rises each year until it is nearly intolerable. I really appreciate simplicty and every movement for artistic change goes through the same cycle: simple, more complex, after mastering the style, roccocco silliness and elaborate madness then shoving it all away for a new simplicity, a new style.

Oh, to click on a page and see what I wish to see, immediately! What a joy that is. Time to visit the BBC again.

Culture of Life News Main Page

Comments

[Rouser]

It appears that they used the LA Times website as a design reference.

[Elaine Meinel Supkis]

I hate the LA Times site. It is similar but not the same as the new NYT site. I wish they would all imitate the BBC. Just because not only ease of use, they have a sidebar for every article of related or previous news relevant to main article that are very useful and I use it a GREAT DEAL which is why we see so many "BBC" attributions on this blog!

[Chris Frampton]

I don't know that the BBC is a good role model. It's a whole page dedicated one paragraph.

[gmanedit]

To read an article in the Brad Blog, I have to copy it and paste it into a word processor.

[judah]

I find your site very readable.