design and color

I took an interesting online course today through NewsU.org, a project of the Poynter Institute. The course is "Color in News Design", which is free with registration to the site. The course talked a lot about the role of color on a news page, and how colors direct readers' eyes to specific parts of the page. The course specifically referred to a Poynter Institute study called "Eye Track", in which participants looked at several pages on a computer while their eye movements were recorded by a small camera within the monitor. I thought it might be interesting to assess the design of a news site, incorporating the points brought up in the NewsU course.

I thought I'd take a look at www.post-gazette.com. This is the site for my local paper in Pittsburgh, PA. The site has a pretty good set up, in terms of "eye track" info. There is a big picture "above the fold" on the left hand side, where the "eye track" claims is most high traffic area for readers. The picture has a caption which draws readers to the story, but the picture itself serves as a link to the whole story. That's a nice feature, because the text might be too overwhelming if it were one big link. To the right of the main picture are three smaller, but still prominent stories, stacked on top of each other. The story on top is given prominence over the other two with bigger font in the headline. The headlines also serve as links, so as not to clutter up text with typical blue underlined lettering. Underneath the main stories are sections of the paper, with a few key stories linked to each. As you scroll down, there seems to be more links than descriptive text. To the left of the site is a long bar of tabs, which link to numerous sections of the site...the number of tabs is quite overwhelming, as is the length of the page altogether.

The colors on the site are pretty simple. White background, blue headlines, black text. The white background allows for text to stick out, but the light blue headlines are not quite bold enough to hold a readers attention too long. The site designers may want to consider a richer color, or perhaps a darker hue. I do like how one tab in each "section" of tabs on the left (like I said, there are a lot...I think these are the most popular sections), is not blue with white lettering, but it is gold with black lettering. The blue background with white text certainly works, but the gold with black text remind the reader that they are reading a Pittsburgh paper. Black and gold are the official colors of the city of Pittsburgh, as they are found on the uniforms of all our professional sports teams and symbolize the city as a whole. There are also a bunch of Post-Gazette related ads (for things like sports inserts, etc) which are completely black and gold, so it is a nice contrast between the left and right columns which surround the body of the layout.

The Post-Gazette could certainly use some work in terms of design, but what they have so far seems to get the job done. However, I would really like to see a big "Pittsburgh Post-Gazette" banner across the top of the page, which the site currently lacks (there is a tiny one...not that effective).