Every time you drop by The Straits Times’ (ST) website, you would be overwhelmed by a superfluous amount of links, multimedia and stories. There are also too many headlines such as “The Big Story”, “Breaking News” and “Latest” seeking for your attention. Instead of helping, they are all confusing you from making a decision to click.
Hence, I wanted to hipster-ise ST’s main page, giving it a more clean and organised look. There are a few components that I’d love to tweak, including the logo, a little element of interactivity and the overall web layout. Keep a lookout for the reasons behind my design decisions!
1. The logo
The logo is made up of straight lines, giving it a sharp look. I wanted it to portray ST as a ‘sharp’ news outlet, delivering news that is accurate. Moreover, the logo also points downwards, leading readers into viewing whatever that is below it, i.e. the breaking news jQuery banner.
I have chosen a serif, chiselled font to give it a more old English text feel. After all, ST was first printed in 1845. The three lines represent the text or information printed, while the word ‘latest’ is a reminder to visitors that ST delivers the most up-to-date news to its readers.
2. Gamification/Interactivity
While clean design is the in-trend now, I prefer the website to be clean yet edgy. The website must stand out, and I’ve chosen to utilise the concept of gamification as part of this project.
On the top right, you can see the ‘Shuffle’ function. When users click on it, the page will randomly choose articles for them, presented in the home page. I think the unpredictability element will be something readers look forward to. Some may even find it addictive!
Nonetheless, to further optimise ad revenue from the website, the transition page will be given a hipster feel. It will also have a blurry background, a current trendy trick even the new iOS has utilised for its interface.
3. Overall layout
I believe that colour-coding will be the way to go in the near future. As shown below, different news sections will be given a unique hue of its own. For example, Singapore is red while Sports is green.
Moreover, every time a reader lands on the page, I want them to be fixated to only one or two elements of the website. In this case, it would be the huge jQuery banner showcasing the latest news around the world.
The footer is also given a lot of white space to breathe. Hopefully, this will give a de-cluttered impression to users, allowing them to focus (and click) on a link more easily. It also sticks to the overall hipster branding with a simple cross navigational feature in the bottom right of the website.
So what do you think?
Update 2016-05-06: All images which contains ST logo were removed due to copyright issue.
Also read: Singapore’s main newspaper Straits Times is now on Instagram
