Design flashback

I am one of maybe five people in the entire world, if that, who looked at the new New Yorker site  and had a flashback to the navigational structure of this site.  But that's only to be expected.

(Thesis: there are interface design paradigms that speak deeply to lit geeks.  Discuss.)

Comments

[metaphorical]

Sure. And there was another site that LF always reminded me of. It had an absurd number of columns across, maybe six, and little blurbs all the way down, as if that boxed area in the WSJ had taken over the whole front page.

I always thought that was a compelling design idea. The New Yorker site looks very usable to me.

[Misha]

Oh, sure, that's what they WANT you to think!

I think their information architecture is a little wonky, myself -- the thing I come there for, the TOC for the new issue -- is kind of hidden. It could be they are trying to force different readerly paradigms between print and web, but I think that sort of thing has to be a bit more staged over time. I'll be interested to see what if anything changes a month from now -- the advantage to a site that changes a lot is that you can tweak things.

[Hippo Dignity » New Yorker des]

[...] My flashback to the old Lingua Franca site on first laying eyes on the new New Yorker site now makes even more sense — I discovered, via Emdashes, that both were designed by the same people. [...]