
The New York Times Redesign is Live - uptown
http://www.nytimes.com/?redesign=true
======
tomelders
If I may take a moment to whinge and whine a tad; Websites like this infuriate
me because for all their "design", sites like Reddit and HN (which are
basically just lists) are delivering news in a much more consumable fashion,
better suited to the eating habits of the common or garden user.

Who's to blame? The designers with their need to make their own mark? The
suits with their demands that the business needs be met regardless of the way
the world actually works? Probably both.

Also, I think Digg deserves more credit for finding a successful mid point
between lists and designed layouts.

That's not to say there's no room for design, but this new NYT layout is
anything but design. It's the same wall of information with sporadic and
indecipherable levels of emphasis made to look mildly palatable for another
couple of years. If the NYT has anything interesting to say, I'll wait for it
to appear on HN, Digg or Reddit.

~~~
roadnottaken
My dad finds sites like Reddit/Digg/HN totally overwhelming, and I doubt he's
alone. It's generational. Sites like NYT use standard design techniques to
direct your attention (font size, etc) that work really well for people that
are more-accustomed to traditional media. And, frankly, seeing a huge-headline
is a much more-immediate way to indicate the importance of a topic than
scanning down a list and looking for stories with lots of upvotes or comments.

~~~
AJ007
The Drudge Report skews heavily for an older (50+) male demographic (going by
Quantcast.) The design is text heavy, small fonts. A more static version of
HN/Reddit, from one or two contributors rather than a community.

Design has not changed since 1997:
[https://web.archive.org/web/19971210093544/http://www.drudge...](https://web.archive.org/web/19971210093544/http://www.drudgereport.com/)

19 million+ US uniques makes it a very important news site (NYTimes has about
the same amount.)

------
babby
The design is overall asthetically pleasing. I just can't fucking take this
trend of fixed bars molesting my vertical resolution and screwing with my
habitual behavior of scanning from the top of the page down as I scroll. This
site's top bar on single pages is so edgy that it's not even at the very top
(a concept I've at least gotten acclimated to) and manages to blend into the
actual article content due to low contrast.

Please just stop doing this, _everyone_! We do not need a bar following us
everywhere by default. As long as it doesn't cause render lag, fixed elements
are fine when they're small buttony icons that expand.

At least they've gotten the snap-back right. Some sites, when scrolled to the
top, do this awkward infuriating stuttery clip-in nonsense where the scroll
position changes as the menu fits back into the content. Just stop.

~~~
Wilduck
I agree totally. This trend is infuriating. When I have to read an article on
the site with a top bar I often go into the developer tools and delete that
node from the DOM. There are sites that make even that measure impossible,
like gmail, which is even more infuriating.

I use a small screen most of the time, and it sometimes seems like the
designers of these sites have never looked at their website on a monitor
smaller than 30 inches.

If it's so important that I be easily able to reach some navigation, put a
tiny, unobtrusive, go-to-the-top button in a fixed element off to the side
which will pop me back up to the nav bar.

------
samwillis
The changes on the homepage a minimal, howserver they have made some big
changes to the artical pages
([http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/08/business/international/asi...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/08/business/international/asian-
factories-see-sense-and-savings-in-environmental-certification.html)).

Note that you can now scroll through the entire article, no clicking next
three times!

~~~
dangoldin
Looks very similar to the NPR blog articles now. I like this trend - long,
clean single page articles.

------
username223
I like the clean typography, and appreciate that they were content with subtle
changes rather than something "radical." But why, oh why, did they add one of
those horrible floating bars at the top of the screen? Those things almost
always break page-down, yo!

~~~
nattaylor
Page down is working for me...

~~~
username223
True, I can still hit the space bar, but it does something different and
broken. Try paging down on HN, and you'll see that the bottom 1-2 lines are
preserved at the top of the screen, so you don't lose your place. Now try it
on NYT: at least for me, there is absolutely no context preserved. That's
better than the all-too-frequent case where a line is missed entirely, but it
still makes reading harder. Plus, I'm so used to lousy sites that skip a line
on page-down that I don't trust the NYT's version not to do so.

EDIT: They seem to do the right thing on articles, but not on the front page.

~~~
TheCoelacanth
The front page is working correctly for me in Firefox 26. When I hit page down
or space the two lines that were at the very bottom of the screen move to just
below the top bar.

------
_stephan
How do you like the typography? I find e.g. the italic font for the headlines
in the left column or the small all caps serif format of the bylines to be
somewhat detrimental to readability.

~~~
ikt
I was just going to say the font sucks, there's a million free fonts on google
fonts that look great... and they appear to have gone with times new roman for
no particular reason.

~~~
cfqycwz
They actually seem to be using Georgia for body, and the headlines are in the
same setting of Cheltenham they use in the physical paper.

------
ghc
I'm underwhelmed. They should have hired the firm that did
[http://globe.com](http://globe.com) . I'm actually puzzled they didn't
considering their ownership of the Globe at the time of that redesign.

------
brianstorms
I like the new design, especially the more iPad-friendly article pages.

But what I am most happy about with the new design is that the NYT didn't
break the backdoor into reading any article behind the paywall, if you're not
a subscriber.

If you run into the paywall that blocks your reading an article, just fire up
whatever Twitter app you use (I use Echofon), type the text of the article's
_headline_ into the search, search for it, you'll find tons of results almost
always, and just click on one of those links.

Presto, you're now reading the article free and clear.

TL;DR If you arrive at a NYT article via a shared social link, you can bypass
the subscription paywall.

~~~
nnethercote
Use private browsing/incognito mode. Much easier.

~~~
cynwoody
Using Chrome, I configured nytimes.com cookies to "Clear on exit" from each
browser session. Since I restart my browser at least once a day, and I only
land on the New York Times as a result of links, I never hit the monthly limit
of 10 free articles.

Open Settings, search for "content settings", click the Manage exceptions
button, and add one for [*.]nytimes.com.

------
k2enemy
I hope they find ways to speed things up. When I return to the main page from
a story, I have to wait five seconds while items on the front page bounce
around as things load. This is on a very fast connection and a mac pro.

~~~
johnnymonster
They have some extremely poor performance optimizations err NO performance
optimizations on the front page. TONS of individual unscaled images loading.
Someone might want to introduce them to a product called "Pagespeed"...

~~~
philip1209
It looks like they're running Varnish for caching the pages - is the main
issue the images?

------
tysone
Details about the redesign and technology overhaul:
[http://source.opennews.org/en-US/articles/behind-scenes-
nyt-...](http://source.opennews.org/en-US/articles/behind-scenes-nyt-
redesign/)

i.e. "… using Github instead of SVN for version control, Vagrant environments,
Puppet deployment, using requireJS so five different versions of jQuery don’t
get loaded, proper build/test frameworks, command-line tools for generating
sprites, the use of LESS with a huge set of mixins, a custom grid framework,
etc."

------
asimov42
Obligatory link to the the skimmer:
[http://www.nytimes.com/skimmer/?pagewanted=all#/Top+News](http://www.nytimes.com/skimmer/?pagewanted=all#/Top+News)

~~~
nicwolff
Or, if you just want to see what's actually on the newsstand, there's
[http://app.nytimes.com/](http://app.nytimes.com/)

------
mikemikemike
The design is almost skeumorphic in its replication of an actual newspaper. I
can understand wanting to do that for branding reasons, the same way
Craigslist is successfully branded as anti-design. But the wall of information
is just such a bad UX... if they want the site to look like the paper, they
should redesign both to have a legible content hierarchy.

------
mars
looks like the FAZ [http://www.faz.net](http://www.faz.net)

~~~
janlukacs
FAZ is better, easier to go through the homepage.

------
notzach
And it's not even responsive.

~~~
xux
they redirect to mobile.* though

~~~
Kartificial
So they still hold on to the old train of thought of desktop users and mobile
users. Shame really.

~~~
venomsnake
As a person that currently maintains separate versions for desktop and mobile
- it is not shameful. It is just good sense.

You are still constrained with a lot of low power devices on the mobile side
and old versions of IE on the desktop side. So it is big PITA to reconcile all
of this.

In 5 year they will converge but right now it is too early.

~~~
lmm
The needs of both are the same: simple, readable design. Every time I see a
site with these two versions I've found that I preferred one to the other, on
both devices - either the desktop version's better even on mobile, or
(usually) the mobile version's better even on desktop.

------
Tepix
The homepage is too wide to fit on a MacBook Air 11" (1368 pixels wide). It's
kind of annoying having to scroll a bit horizontally.

The article pages are great.

------
joshnyc2011
The NYT redesign is a failure, on the public editor column's comments section
21 people liked the new design while over 700 people are complaining:
Navigation. layout, fonts and accessibility are all hindering subscribers use
of the site.

------
ollysb
The design for the page that they use to introduce the design seems vastly
better than the actual redesign
[http://www.nytimes.com/redesign/](http://www.nytimes.com/redesign/)

------
psteinweber
Visiting the site not very often I think I wouldn't have recognized it as a
"redesign". Feels more like "some tweaks". Was hoping for some whitespace, the
elements are quite cramped together.

------
geekowl
They removed the Technology link from the main page...

~~~
mandlar
Go to Sections -> News -> Technology. Quite a bit hidden.

------
ollie101
Pretty underwhelming

------
nnethercote
The best thing is having the entire article on a single page. No more clicking
through to see the second (or third, or fourth...) part, yay.

------
kilovoltaire
Seems like they increased the font size, at least slightly? Which would
definitely be a positive thing in my opinion.

Anyone have side-by-side screenshots?

~~~
uptown
This page shows older versions of the site in a carousel towards the bottom:

[http://www.nytimes.com/redesign/](http://www.nytimes.com/redesign/)

~~~
meleva
I prefered the 2012 version. The blue titles stood out more and made it easier
to scan the articles of the front page in one go

------
abrowne
I like the new article pages generally, but I might need to write a userstyle
to remove the position: fixed on the floating top bar.

~~~
Touche
With Stylish:

    
    
       @namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
    
       @-moz-document domain("www.nytimes.com") { 
       #masthead {
         position: relative !important;
       }
    
       }

~~~
abrowne
Thanks, saved me the trouble ;-)

------
Touche
This is a really good redesign, and I don't want to be negative, but position:
fixed should _never_ be used on articles.

------
count
Why in the world would I want to add a web page to notification center, just
by visiting the front page?

That's SUPER obnoxious.

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mmuro
Not even attempting to be responsive?

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ishener
mmm... not sure if the redesign is not available in my country, or it's just
hardly noticeable

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3pt14159
The mobile version is fantastic.

------
fderp
Not responsive.... why even bother redesigning today with a separate mobile
subdomain?

~~~
talmand
Responsive is not always the proper solution.

------
0A0D66
#000000 on all the text is quite aggressive isn't it?

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antonius
Thought I was on the Wall Street Jounal.. similar layouts.

------
philip1209
The italicized headlines on the homepage look odd.

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webwanderings
10 ghostery items and 23 Ads. Nice.

------
scotthtaylor
Still seems very busy to me.

~~~
poolpool
Its a global newspaper. There is an extraordinary amount of information that
needs to be shown.

~~~
scotthtaylor
Plenty of newspapers cope with this; however, I have to say the individual
article pages look great.

------
lwsclrk
It's OK. Tech isn't on the home page. Still prefer Quartz.

------
moeedm
Looks great.

