It’s odd, I wouldn’t say I have a lot love for the way newspapers look, but I have a lot of love for print production. To be frank, newspapers do good things in print layout, they are successful and that is why they have been around for so long putting ink on our fingers. To consider what a blog is, and what this site is, it’s a resource for information, a newsletter that gets published for people interested in the associated topics. It’s fitting to choose a newspaper layout. But my inspiration for the video look was inspired by the Harry Potter movies and Firefly, the short-lived TV series in the States. Their newspapers, in their world, combined both the old and the new. Instead of photographs they used video or digital text inlaid onto their papers. More than anything, I thought this notion, of combining the old with the new, would translate to the web very well.

The modular grid has been missing through the internet since, well, it’s never gotten onto the internet yet. In essence, it’s designing a grid layout in which the content can be filled into in many combinations. It gives more freedom to the designer, it doesn’t bore the reader, it uses it’s space more efficiently, it balances out the weight, and more. This has not been seen on the internet for one reason, or maybe two, but it comes down to the lack of design and the lack of development. Sure you can do a couple of templates, but there really isn’t a great example of a single website that uses the same grid in different combinations. Also more rare, is doing this with dynamic content. You really need your group to think together to accomplish a modular grid, but if it’s designed correctly and the developers are good, it takes a relatively short amount of time to develop. For this site, my homepage will be a modular grid. At the moment, since I am participating in May 1st Reboot, I did not want to vary the index too much, in fact I just wanted to show my “breaking news headline” layout first, it’s fitting for the article. But when I put a new article out, the index will change grids, the article page will change grids, the grids within the grids will change. Right now, the article pages change layout. Once you design a single page layout, the rest easily follow.

Thinking on the idea further of doing a newspaper layout, you may ask yourself, “Louisa, this is the Internet, multi-column layouts do not work within web pages.” As many people would like to point out that newspaper layouts may be bad usability, in essence, anything could be bad or good usability depending on how it is designed (Jakob Nielsen’s website anyone? I respect what this man has done for the user’s experience, but his site points out that he is no designer and that it is lacking usability in the end.) Most of the complaints come from the column layout, that if the column spans under the fold you would have to scroll up to begin the next column. While this is true, a designer can design within this constraint. Usability often deals with a user’s/viewer’s experience with that medium more so than with a new one. So when we think of newspaper versus the internet, newspapers have been around a lot, lot longer and each one is fairly similar to the next. Usability-wise, newspapers, or magazines, have more of a familiarility than webpages; the Internet has not been around that long. Moreso, layouts on the Internet differ from one to another. This layout tries to experiment with a modular grid, because I truly believe that it can work and be feasible, but I also tried making this site as intuitive as I could. Granted, I wanted some nice visual appeal so you wouldn’t expect a layout like this for the New York Times, it would fail for that much content, but there is common ground here. Having said that, you can expect more neat stuff through this layout, an ever-changing layout, because of this grid. This layout is, hopefully, a beginning for designers to bring the ideas from print into the Internet more.

So if you like this layout, go to the May 1st Reboot site and vote for it. In my next article, I will be exploring how to do this idea within development, the fun back-end stuff. Cheers!