It’s been about a month and a half since I started this blog. And I figure that it’s about time to redesign. Not that I did much in the way of design in the first place, but I’ve recently been inspired to fire up the Photoshop again and see what I can come up with.

2007 has been a popular year for redesigns, as a handful of newspapers and magazines have updated their online and physical designs. I checked out some of the more recent website redesigns to see if I could glean any ideas.

It’s surprisingly hard to find screengrabs of sites in previous design iterations, so some of my shots may be a little out of date. They serve mostly to give an idea of what the site came from before its present form.

The Los Angeles Times

The LA Times recently updated its site, and it takes on a notably Apple-inspired look, especially in the header. I’m not super excited about the 50% gray background, though. On the article pages and sub pages — pages without the big blue header — the gray is a little overwhelming and makes the page look bland. I do like the contrast between the old-timey LA Times logo and the clean, modern page design.

Grade: B-

The Boston Globe

What I like best about the Globe’s redesign are the changes made to article pages. Check it out, it’s bigger! Bigger fonts, more room for the text, overall much easier to read. In fact, in a lot of these recent redesigns webdesigners have begun defaulting to larger screensizes. No longer is 600×800 the standard anymore, which is strange because I figure if old people (or those who are generally more behind in technological adoption) go to any websites they’d be newspaper sites, so newspapers should be the last to embrace larger screen sizes. The boston.com mainpage has been cleaned up aesthetically as well as made larger. All around I’d say this is a very successful redesign.

Grade: A

ABC News.com

ABC News made a pretty rare decision by choosing a dark color scheme, and I think they pull that off pretty well. Their new site is also an improvement from the tab-addled multimedia onslaught of their former layout, but it still suffers from many of the same problems. There’s little flow on the front page, for instance. It’s just a mess of headlines, and there’s no delineation by importance. Also, I’m not a big fan of having lot’s of movement on a front page, and ABC News’ sliding top stories gets annoying. But what I like least about ABC News’ site are the story pages. Three column article pages are hard to get right and probably shouldn’t be done at all, and ABC News gets them totally wrong by making each column huge, save the one the reader cares about.

Grade: D

Detroit News

I think I’m going to ignore DetNews.com’s red on black color scheme. I dislike it, but it’s a unique choice. What I’m going to focus on here is DetNews’ former eyeblight of a website. It was extremely terrible. They did right by first removing the long and cluttered left menubar. Also I like how the content boxes are clearly defined on the main page. The article pages are nice and big and give the reader the option of — get this! — choosing which font size to use. It’s a good redesign, save the red-black-gray color scheme, which wasn’t implemented very well.

Grade: B+

Now back to designing my own site, I’m thinking electric-yellow on purple?