[HN Gopher] The Guardian digital design style guide
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The Guardian digital design style guide
Author : DerekBickerton
Score : 48 points
Date : 2023-11-07 17:48 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (design.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (design.theguardian.com)
| user_7832 wrote:
| It's a good presentation of design style. Personally I'm not a
| huge fan of their serif font's sharp edges, but the absence of a
| paywall is good enough to overlook that. (If anyone says "You
| should be willing to pay for good journalism" - I wouldn't mind
| paying if my student budget allowed it.)
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It's a strong paper in many ways. I particularly like the
| sports coverage, it helped make me a Premier League fan.
| xnx wrote:
| I'm glad that some form of reader mode is now available in all
| major browsers to turn off weird visual decoration and focus on
| the content.
| itslennysfault wrote:
| This is news to me. After seeing your comment I went through
| every menu on chrome and can't find it. Is this actually a
| thing. Is it just really well hidden or am I just a dummy?
| xnx wrote:
| I think it must still be in some level of development/testing
| for Chrome because it's is very hidden. I just tried these
| instructions on Chrome desktop version and was able to enable
| it: https://www.computerworld.com/article/3697312/google-
| chrome-...
| account-5 wrote:
| I don't use chrome. In Firefox reader mode is an icon in
| the address bar you can just press. Why would chrome hide
| it? Unless I'm missing something and you're both talking
| about something completely different.
| xnx wrote:
| It's that same type of feature, but it seems like Chrome
| is timid about rolling it out fully (possibly because it
| hides ads).
| pferdone wrote:
| The Guardian, especially for their podcasts, is the only news
| website I am paying and have ever payed for. And I pay more
| willingly than any other newspaper would get from me for their
| paywall stuff. It's that valuable for me to support this
| approach.
| ravenstine wrote:
| Nice style guide, better than most.
|
| However, I may never understand why grid systems get the amount
| of reverence that they do. Although there's a certain necessity
| in having consistency, I can't help but view grid systems has a
| sort of pseudoscience. Page 2/7 in this style guide shows
| examples of many page elements that aren't really consistent with
| their grid. I've also seen plenty of websites with great designs
| that have different sized margins, or they lack dead space, or
| their gutters are different sizes, and they look fine. Grids make
| more sense for print because you have a single size of viewport,
| vertically and horizontally, therefore you need to have a system
| for fitting what you can on a single page. On the web, there's
| infinite vertical space, and most news websites don't take "above
| the fold" that seriously anymore. Besides, the web developer will
| _inevitably_ be asked to do some one off special design at some
| point that violates the grid system. It might as well not exist,
| but be relegated to a light guideline.
| jfornear wrote:
| Grid Systems by Josef Muller-Brockmann
| (https://amzn.to/3Mzt5AB) is my favorite design book, but I
| just use an 8x8 grid since it became the standard on iOS.
| idoubtit wrote:
| A large part of this guide is totally unimportant to me. I don't
| think I would detect a change in some of these policies. It's
| probably already changed in the past years, and I've never seen
| it while reading the Guardian daily.
|
| The problem with this focus on design consistency and cosmetic
| features is that they loose the global view. I pay for the
| Guardian, and I'm glad to pay for their content, yet I still have
| to use uBlock to hide some annoying blocks. I've also painfully
| configured uBlock to disable carrousels (how am I supposed to
| read anything with images sliding next to it?). And I still
| prefer their website with JS turned off, though it breaks a few
| things.
|
| I'd prefer an ugly and inconsistent frontpage, even a plain table
| of titles, if there was a way to, for instance, display the most
| important news of the last X=5 days in the category
| Y=International, etc.
| hadrien01 wrote:
| > It's probably already changed in the past years
|
| The Guardian's website has changed very little since 2015 or
| so[0]. The logo, fonts, and colour palette have evolved in
| 2018, but the structure, grid, or even the category colours
| (orange for opinion, blue for sport, etc.) have not changed at
| all.
|
| [0]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20150131232757/http://www.thegua...
| fyokdrigd wrote:
| in 1996 several online version of famous news papers were posting
| that exact same guide. it's not innovative or good. it's just
| what you will get if you put print designers to churn web design
| to webmasters (damn in old).
|
| also the reason designers were posting this was because they were
| all looking for jobs.
| simbolit wrote:
| iPad safari user: for some reason the page doesn't scroll in
| portrait. When i rotate the device into landscape everything is
| fine. Odd.
| subpixel wrote:
| I'd much rather read the daily news as a Bear-style blog, with
| the addition of categories.
|
| https://herman.bearblog.dev/blog/
|
| One url for the whole day. Oh how I hate the scroll.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| I will never pay for anything from The Guardian because of their
| unashamed parrotting of British establishment propaganda during
| the lead up to the Scottish independence referendum. There was no
| effort whatsoever to be impartial or even bother representing the
| truth.
|
| Their Scottish reporting continues in the same vein to this day.
| tmnvix wrote:
| Similar story with their coverage of Clinton/Sanders during the
| US primaries. Also the coverage of Corbyn (effectively leading
| the charge with some very tenuous but oft-repeated accusations
| of antisemitism). The bias shown on these two issues in
| particular have been detrimental to the credibility of the
| Guardian in my opinion.
|
| It seems the Guardian's editorial position has become decidedly
| centrist/establishment since I first started reading the
| Guardian Weekly many many years ago. They have long since
| stopped being the voice of the left. That is unless you
| subscribe to a left/right schism defined along the lines of
| identity politics - which helps explain the Guardian's
| rejection of Sanders in favour of Clinton.
|
| Despite all of that, I do still find it a good source of news
| and visit the site most days. Aside from the content, the site
| is very good in my opinion. I'll be taking a closer look at the
| design style guide for sure.
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(page generated 2023-11-07 23:01 UTC)