CNN Homepage Redesign Critique

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1. Who else is talking about the CNN.com redesign? I found a few more blog posts that cover the topic in much more depth.

   Chris Boese has an in-depth overview of the redesign. As a former employee he has some insights into the decision making on the content.

   Bill Lea dissects the CNN design. Bill highlights the fact that the code does not validate and that the Javascript load is fairly large.

   

   Bryan Zmijewski added this 8 months ago
2. Totally agree on the featured blocks up top and the preponderance of gutters. Those content blocks with the drop shadows are so close together the shadows start to just look like a straight gradient from one to the next...not even really a gutter.

   

   Jonathan Smiley added this 8 months ago
3. What this redesign says to me is, "Hey, our readers can only handle two major news stories at a time." I just don't think that's the case. I think with news, people want information overload, not structure overload.

   The red header is actually nice in that the structure is absolute—you know exactly where navigation ends and content begins. That said, it might be too much. They're sacrificing a lot over vertical space for that logo.

   The font sizes just kill me as well. I've never had to zoom in a page that I come to regularly to read it comfortably. Zooming in just once makes it so much better.

   And finally, those blocks of content in the middle of the page... what the heck? They're so hard to read that I just see lines of text, not meaningful stories. The grid here just gets in the way—show me a sexy list of headlines with quick lead paragraphs and I'll do the rest, CNN.

   Overall, probably 1 step forward and 2 steps back for this redesign. Good intentions, and some nice design moments, but overall confusing.

   

   Mark Otto added this 8 months ago

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