New design for the homepage of time.com, the website of Time Magazine.
Time Magazine started rolling out a redesign of time.com yesterday – it was designed by my friend and former colleague Sean Villafranca, who left our group at the Times earlier this year to become the Design Director for time.com.
It strikes me as a welcome departure from its previous CNN-esque iteration, and a little more faithful to the print design. I like the use of Arial Black, and the daring use of the TIME wordmark on the white background. (Daring because it would’ve been far more predictable to use the wordmark reversed on a red background.)
They seem to have only rolled-out the home page and the article pages at this point – section fronts still show the legacy design. But on the whole, it’s a very good improvement to a very good news resource – just in time for the general election season.
ALSO – A few birdies tell me to expect some major design changes to wsj.com today or tuesday, coming hot-off-the-heels of their magazine launch this month. Yes, we’ve heard this before, but there are some preview screenshots out there. Stay Tuned!
I couldn’t disagree more. While the old Time.com site may have left some things to be desired, it was at least easy to scan the page and see what was new and worth reading (thinking in particular of the slideshow of the 5 new articles). Now, I find the site to border on garish and the cacophony of different font and picture sizes makes it terribly difficult to scan for information. Yesterday, for example, Time ran an article on the poisoning of babies in China. And I never saw it, because it was never linked off the front page (as near as I can tell). I regret the redesign and wish they had a way for us to view the site with the old layout.
As an aside: why do vertical pink bars cover your site when it’s rendered in Safari? They make it impossible to interact with the site…. You mention you’re using a Mac in your colophon….@M. Anthony Aiello, the pink bars are only supposed to show when you press CTRL+SHIFT+G or CTRL+ALT+G, but I realize that it does it when you type just “G”. Its part of this package, which enables designers to quickly add a grid to their site.
I left it on because I thought that it was interesting to see, but I agree that it is annoying when you’re trying to navigate around. I’ll remove it.
Thanks.