05 February
Leaked!! The new M&G site screen shots
We’ve published quite a few scoops over the last few months namely the release of Laaik and Play from 24, the Nudjit launch and now leaked screen shots of the much anticipated and documented M&G redesign.
OK, so maybe the screens weren’t leaked but actually graciously sent to me by the head strategist of M&G and Amatomu co-founder Vincent Maher. I caught up with him on Skype and he gave me the low down on their latest project -
The screen shots below is straight after their first internal review attended by Vince Maher, Matthew Buckland, Riaan (M&G editor) and Matthew (the news editor). The goal was to bed down the style and the grid of the homepage which is about 50% done. The way they setup their homepage mock up is exactly what it would look like online with real content, the exact type size, face and line height. The next step was to print and review as a team (team mentioned above). Then they navigated the same mock up in a browser to check the vertical units have their own visual logic in the loading view.
Vincent Maher: Ideally we want people to stop scrolling at logical points and what they see is something that makes sense on its own. Or, if they don’t, there must be enough visual markers to understand that they have stopped between blocks..
Some of the other notable changes are -
- Horizontal navigation
- Wide format 96opx wide, centered
- Essentially four columns decreasing in width towards the right
- Colour – we’re dropping the red and black links because its hard to read
- Blurbs shortened from 5o to about 17 words
Tomorrow is the second round of meetings and then Vince and his team start work on the sections and story pages. Screen shots below -
Pics of the M&G brains trust working on the design
Remember you saw it here first!
Tags:
February 5th, 2008 at 5:19 pm
[...] Norman has leaked some of the (very first) mockups on his [...]
February 5th, 2008 at 7:56 pm
interesting. to my newspaperman’s eye these pics have been reversed – either that or the M&G is about to venture into cutting-edge mirror-image web publishing
But the pages are intriguing nevertheless
February 6th, 2008 at 9:48 am
[...] Mail & Gaurdian, one of South Africa’s leading newspapers, ‘leaked’ some inside info about their main news site’s redevelopment. Going from ASP to PHP and going [...]
February 6th, 2008 at 11:28 am
[...] Norman of Bandwidth Blog has once again gotten the scoop on the “some of the (very first) mockups” of the new design for the Mail & Guardian [...]
February 7th, 2008 at 8:15 am
Looks very busy but should be a content ho!
@AndrewT – I think webcams flip the picture for some reason.
February 7th, 2008 at 9:32 am
Hahah @ Andrew.. Just to add some spice they flipped the pics.
February 12th, 2008 at 9:36 am
Hi, I just discovered your blog and it’s great, content and layout. I have added it to my technology pagecast. I can also see that Bandwidth will be a great resource for my work (Kabissa.org). Just one thing – you have a link to post to Stumble but how about adding one to Muti as well:)
February 22nd, 2008 at 1:33 pm
[...] Today Mail & Guardian launched a stand alone job site, dubbed JobConnection, that will replace their previous jobs portal which was hosted on M&G’s main site. [...]
June 17th, 2008 at 11:28 pm
[...] posted the scoop a few months ago about the new M&G site layout and I’m sure you remember it. Vincent Maher head strategist for M&G and Amatomu [...]