Our redesign of Adver­tis­ing Age, the lead­ing jour­nal of the adver­tis­ing pro­fes­sion, brought the mag­a­zines web­site up to date and into line with mod­ern best prac­tices. While adding crisp­ness, con­sis­ten­cy, and pre­dictabil­i­ty to nav­i­ga­tion and lay­out (includ­ing ad sizes), we intro­duced vari­able home­page tem­plate for­mat­ting to grant online edi­tors and art direc­tors the same kind of flex­i­bil­i­ty their print-side col­leagues had long enjoyed.

Along with a com­plete visu­al over­haul, the redesign includ­ed a restruc­tur­ing and repo­si­tion­ing. In the past, the print mag­a­zine was Adver­tis­ing Age and the web­site was, well, a web­site. But with this redesign, the full edi­to­r­i­al expe­ri­ence of Adver­tis­ing Age came to the web. In a wel­come mes­sage, the mag­a­zines Scott Dona­ton wrote:

For the first time ever, the full con­tents of the cur­rent issue of Adver­tis­ing Age will be avail­able online for sub­scribers on Sun­day night, the day before the print edi­tion hits news­stands and in-boxes.

A redesign for a changing time

Pub­lish­ing is chang­ing, adver­tis­ing is chang­ing, where peo­ple get their news is chang­ing, and how pub­li­ca­tions earn their keep is chang­ing. The jour­nal­is­tic enter­prise is no longer one-sided: mag­a­zines, while remain­ing author­i­ta­tive, must also lis­ten to their read­ers voic­e­sand read­ers want to know what oth­er read­ers have to say. On top of all that, there were tough deci­sions to be made about free ver­sus paid con­tent. We advised on all these issues.

Our team worked close­ly and intense­ly with Adver­tis­ing Age to solve archi­tec­tur­al, design, and usabil­i­ty chal­lenges, and to intro­duce mod­ern and expect­ed read­er-empow­er­ment fea­tures (such as com­ment­ing) with­out vio­lat­ing the sense of con­trol that is impor­tant to old-school read­ers and editors.

Vis­it the site.

Our responsibilities on this project

Research and con­sult­ing; infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture; brand design; graph­ic design; user inter­face design; user expe­ri­ence design; CSS/HTML tem­plate devel­op­ment. Launched 9 April 2006.