WIG: The Boston Globe’s Website

It is no easy task to design a clean-looking website that also accommodates a lot of content. We encounter a variation of this difficulty every time we make a presentation. This balancing act is particularly pertinent for news media websites, because the two attributes — enticing design and plentiful information — are central to their goals. To me, the Boston Globe’s website is one of the best current examples of success in this regard. Many websites primarily use lines or boxes to signify a separation of content. The Boston Globe’s website, however, emphasizes the actual amount of whitespace between headlines, allowing for a significantly less straining viewing experience. I also like that they choose to place images next to even the smaller headlines: though the images do not necessarily convey that much information, they are helpful visual cues and do much to dispel the feeling of reading through a bulk of text. The Boston Globe was also one of the first newspapers to incorporate responsive design on their website, which highlights their attention to the spatial arrangement of text.