Mashable Redesign

Awesome work, nclud!

Congratulations on this work!

Am I the only one who dislikes the redesign? I mean sure it’s fresh, but IMO the old design was both more aesthetically pleasing and far more efficient / useful in the way it was laid out.

Plus with the old design you could drag picture and broadcast the article on twitter etc. that was cool, it might be Meebo that removed this though as I’m pretty sure the Meebo bar (or whatever it was called) had control over this ???

@Anonymous,

Thanks for being candid, always apprecaited. This re-“design” was more focused on strategy implementation than pure pleasing aesthetics. Of course the objective was for it to look good, but the very simplistic design was dictated out of a desire to ensure the flow and consumption of content was more efficient/elegant with an increased focused on any individual piece of contents ability to be shared across online social networks.

The primary objectives from a visual aesthetic perspective were to ensure the site was clean, organized and well structured for easy viewing/consumption. Performance and load time were also large factors for consideration; especially with the high volume of traffic while on the WordPress platform.

Dig the design, lots of content but doesn’t feel cluttered.

The general layout and cleaner header/nav is a nice improvement in terms of efficiency and elegance, but I question the use of the skinny helvetica font for the body copy.  The micro-thin characters combined with tight kerning makes my eyes hurt…I have 20/20 vision and still have difficulty reading it. 

Frankly, I do not peruse Technorati simply because of that same font.  Legibility is an important element to consider in design, especially for a webzine as important and widely read as Mashable. If I cannot read it at my age, entire segments of the population will have trouble. 

PS - I really like the design of this blog! The live preview function is wonderful for us perfectionists.

@Shannon,

Thanks for the comment; type choice is always a very difficult thing (well, that is highly debatable I am sure). There are a lot of challenges from designers who are for and against exploring with type choices on the web, innovators who like to use type choices as a differentiators and usability advocates who strongly believe there are only really one or two real type choices when working on the web—definitely not going to jump into that debate here. But we are constantly concerned with and aware of the issues with legibility and type choices; especially in publication based design. We do run our type choices by test groups prior to a launch such as this ... it is something worth consistently evaluating and something we build to easily modify.

Nice work, guys and girls. I imagine this redesign posed all sorts of fun challenges in dealing with the sheer amount of content Mashable has on any given page.

I hope you were paid (in part, at least) in photos of Pete Cashmore with his arm around the team.

Thanks Jason.

It was great working with Pete and the Mashable team ... it always a refreshing feeling when you work with a client who is so passionate and personally invested in their own initiative.

They’ve spent so much time and energy understanding their content, their subject matter, their online experience as well as their audience that it makes our job both challenging and exciting at the same time.

What was most interesting is the understanding and insight that the Mashable team has on the industry as a whole; making our strategic discussions not only beneficial to the redesign initiative, but also to our internal interests and education.

Job well done guys! It’s really awesome!

Congrats guys, this is fantastic.  :)

Great stuff. Love it.

Random query: Is the progressive page loading/rendering something new? Don’t know that I noticed it before, but am intrigued by it. Great work!