Jack Shafer likes the New York Times website redesign so much that he’s canceling his print subscription:
Ever since newspapers took to the Internet, most have straddled a wobbly design space that was neither print nor Web. The NYTimes.com redesign elegantly melds the two worlds. First, the home page echoes the look of a newspaper front page, capitalizing on 200 years of design grammar to say “This Is Important” and “This Is Slightly Less So.” But at the same time, it feels like a Web page. Its architecture of tabs and sections does a better job of sorting the newspaper contents into perusable categories, as a Web site should.
It is a very good redesign, although I think it could use a bit more vertical whitespace between articles – and the whole TimesSelect idea is totally ridiculous. (Seriously, who would pay for the bloviations of Frank Rich, Maureen Dowd, or Paul Krugman?!) The Times may have crappy reporting, a biased New York attitude of liberal elitism, and the print edition may be swirling the drain, but their website is one of the best newspaper sites out there.
Of course, when you have a genius like Khoi Vinh on your staff, it’s hardly surpring. Vinh was the mastermind behind The Onion‘s great redesign, which is another of the best-structured page designs out there today.
Now, if only the NYT could redesign their bias, they might be relevant again…
It doesn’t seem to load well when viewed on a Mac, unless they are seriously into white space in the top part of the page.
I date the decline of the paper from the day they decided to eliminate the period after the word Times in the nameplate. That was clearly a sign that they no longer wished to uphold traditional values. The Wall Street Journal, which continues to be sensible about most things other than immigration, has wisely kept the period after its name.
I haven’t noticed any problems on my Macs – in either Safari or Camino. It is horribly broken on IE for Mac, but everything is horribly broken on IE for Mac these days – especially given that it hasn’t been updated in over 5 years…
By gum, you’re right. The NYT site works fine with the Firefox browser. So why was I using IE for Mac, you may well ask? No good reason. Old habits die hard.