Episode Transcript

Karen:

Hi, this is a Responsive Web Design Podcast, where we interview the people who make responsive designs happen. I’m your host, Karen McGrane, and this week I’ll be flying solo as Ethan has graciously extended to me the same courtesy that I extended him by not showing up for the episode. So, I’m very excited today to be joined by Paul Pensom and Patrick Burgoyne from Creative Review. Welcome, welcome!

Paul:

Hi!

Patrick:

Thanks!

Karen:

But before we get on with it, I’d like to welcome back our sponsor, Gather Content. I’m thrilled that they’ll be sponsoring this podcast for the rest of the year. I recommend Gather Content to my own clients who are going through a website redesign. Gather Content provides some much needed structure and editorial workflow to help manage a large-scale content creation process. Because Gather Content works with so many organizations going through a website redesign, they have unique insight into how content fits into a web project. And because they are such great people, they wrote down their advice for you! They’ve put together a 41-page guide to Content Strategy for Website Projects. Head on over to gathercontent.com/RWD to read their advice or download a PDF to share with your team. Thanks, Gather Content!

So, I would love it if perhaps you could both just introduce yourselves, tell me a little bit about what you do at Creative Review. Paul, do you want to go first?

Paul:

Yeah, sure. I’m the art director; I’ve been the art director for eight or nine years, initially print only when we started, although we did have a web presence, but obviously has become more and more important as the years go by.

Patrick:

And I’m Patrick, I’m the editor of Creative Review. So, I kind of look after all the manifestations of the brand really, from the print magazine, the website, all of our social media stuff, all the live stuff that we do—I have a kind of general overview of all that from the content perspective.

Karen:

Well, I’m really delighted that you’re both here today, and possibly because I’m really interested to hear about your journey to a responsive redesign. Could you perhaps start out by talking about how you made the decision to go responsive and maybe if there were any questions or concerns or issues with taking the publication responsive?

Patrick:

Sure, maybe I can take that one, because Creative Review is part of a bigger publishing company called Centaur Media, and before our redesign Centaur had already started on quite a big project to transition all of its publishing brand websites over to WordPress; they were on kind of a bespoke publishing platform. So it was really the overall digital strategy team for Centaur who had looked at the best options for our web presence for the future, so it was really down to them to go with the decision to go responsive. And I think a lot of that was particularly on some of our other titles which tend to be quite news-driven. In the old print days they would have been weekly magazines, news and jobs titles where there was quite a high degree of mobile usage already, and I think going responsive was deemed to be the best solution to cover both desktop, mobile, and tablet users through one design process.

Karen:

I might follow up on that by asking if you struggled or if you had questions around the needs of mobile users and how they might different from desktop users. And I’ll ask that specifically because I think I’ve noticed in the industry that—without naming any names—some very traditional graphic design publications, beautiful magazines that are really founded on design, sometimes struggle with the mobile format, and it’s challenging to adapt the editorial or the brand to the smaller form factor. Did you have questions or concerns around mobile users and desktop users really wanting a different experience or needing different things?

Patrick:

Yeah, I think so. It’s probably similar to some of the other magazines that you’re thinking of in that we still have a very high proportion of desktop users, and I think that really comes down to the kind of magazine we are, the fact that so many of our readers or users are in a studio or working from a desktop, and so they will go onto Creative Review when they have some time spared to check up on what’s going on, to read an article, maybe follow a social media link. But a lot of that time they’re in situ, they’re not necessarily as out and about or mobile as readers of other types of publications may be. And I think even now the proportion of desktop users we have versus mobile is probably still quite a lot higher than, say, a newspaper would be. I think for a lot of titles, it still makes sense to be desktop-first even though I guess over time everyone is facing up to the fact that mobile usage is going to increase and we really do have to start thinking about that, even though the figures right now might still be very much still skewed to desktop.

But in terms of the different experiences, and this goes for the whole kind of responsive question, a lot of it I think is around the way in which you have to give up so much control, even more so than with any other kind of website design. Paul, I guess that would have been some of your thoughts when we were looking at responsive, and the fact that so much of it is beyond your control in terms of the way in which people end up using it, the size at which they’re using things, and trying to design once for many different sizes and formats can be quite tricky.

Paul:

Yeah, it’s not feasible is it, really? Essentially you’d have to be setting up separate teams to produce the same content over multiple platforms. I think something to bear in mind with our magazine, and probably other creative magazines as well, is a good seventy to eighty percent of our content comes or is essentially drawn from the imagery; there’s very, very little content we have that won’t already come with associated imagery. There’s not too many things that we’d have to commission for to illustrate.

Karen:

Let me extend that and ask a little bit about how designing for responsive changed your design process. So as you were thinking about managing all of the decisions that you would make across layouts and grids and typography and image handling, what changed for you as designers?

Paul:

I think there’s a degree of streamlining there, the simplification, and you have to find a middle way. When we were looking at examples of publications or sites that had gone before in doing this kind of thing, we thought a lot of them had overshot the mark to a certain extent. It’s almost as if you have a sweet spot for desktop design, you have a sweet spot for mobile design, and in coming up with a responsive design people would quite often come up with something which wouldn’t look quite right. It’s kind of the worst of both worlds; too small for desktop design and too large for mobile design. So it takes an awful lot of fine-tuning to get something that’s acceptable.

Patrick:

I think the proportions are very difficult. A lot of the time you’ll see sites that have been designed with probably the mobile screen in mind first of all. When you look at them on desktop, everything seems oversized, the white space seems too generous, the typefaces seem quite clumsy because by the time they get translated to the desktop they become so large, and all the elements are so large. I think that was very much in our thinking, looking at quite a few sites like that and thinking, this doesn’t feel like it has the refinement or the quality that we’re aiming for; and certainly what we aim for in print, it felt like it was difficult to translate those things over.

I guess what really helped us was really using that card structure which underpins a lot of WordPress sites, and trying to think about those elements being grounded as much as possible. I think, again, with a lot of websites you see a lot of the elements that tend to kind of float around the page too much for my liking. I know Paul did a lot of work on the use of keylines and grids to really make things feel much more cohesive and anchored and get over that idea of lots of elements just feeling too “floaty”—I think that was a word we used a lot when we were designing things.

Karen:

Talk to me a little bit about how this process might or might not have changed the tools that you use to design. So, Ethan and I sometimes talk to teams that have adopted Sketch or even moving things into the browser much more quickly to do more prototyping. And we talk to other teams that are basically like, “You’re gonna pry Photoshop and Illustrator out of our cold, dead hands.” Did you start using different tools as part of this process?

Patrick:

Ollie, a designer who’s unfortunately no longer with Centaur, he was very much a part of this process, and Ollie and Paul worked very closely on this. Paul would use the tools which you’re more familiar with, which would have been InDesign and Photoshop, show things to Ollie, and Ollie was very much about, “Let’s get this stuff in the browser as soon as possible.” So we really did do a lot of stuff where we would get it up onto a browser, onto a test site so that we could really understand how the elements would work, especially once you started making them into responsive elements and dragging that window around and seeing how things rearrange themselves and so on. I think getting it into the browser as soon as possible was really important for us.

Karen:

Let me then ask a little bit about editorial. So, I’ve worked with some publishers and have spoken to some publishers that say a responsive redesign is actually an opportunity to re-conceive of different editorial packages and products. So, they might launch new content types, they might introduce new features, and it’s really about thinking through the types of content that they want to publish. Other organizations say they don’t even think about touching editorial direction as part of a redesign, it’s really just about making the site work on different device types. Did you make any changes to your editorial direction as part of this?

Patrick:

Yes, definitely. I think what we were really interested in was the way in which we could package content—both current content and archive content. I mean, Creative Review has been going since 1980. Not all of that content is available digitally yet, but we’ve certainly got stuff going back as early as the year 2000. The nature of our content is that it has a longer shelf life than a lot of titles. We really wanted to try and explore that idea and look at ways in which we could create packages around topics—so, for example, the Olympics—or themes, or subject areas, and re-present a lot of that content. One of the really nice things about the site that we’ve got is the way in which we can do that through landing pages, collections of content, related content. It definitely kind of rethinks the way we are approaching content.

We’ve got a great digital content producer with us now, Salonee, who’s been with us for about six months now, whose job it is to really kind of reimagine how we can present a lot of that content. It’s been really great fun exploring that idea and taking not quite a book publishing approach but certainly thinking about ways in which you could bring together maybe everything we’ve ever written about a certain person or a certain brand, or bringing together themes, and really trying to extract a lot of the value out of the archive. I know that’s something that a lot of publishers dream about; that they think they’ve got this amazing archive and they could get everybody to pay for this, that, and the other. I’m not sure that we’re necessarily thinking in that same way, but we’ve certainly seen, since the new site launched, a lot of traffic for older content that we’ve been able to point people to in more interesting ways and re-present in more interesting ways.

Karen:

That is music to my ears and is something that I advocate for and try to help clients with quite a bit. Which leads me to ask: how did moving to WordPress help with those goals? Did it make your editorial ambitions a little easier? Did it make the responsive process easier? Or was it just a whole other set of problems?

Patrick:

I think it made it a lot easier. Funnily enough, our first ever website, which was probably in about 2003, something like that, was a WordPress blog, and so we’ve kind of come full circle back to WordPress again. But what’s been a delight really has been the way in which you can have so much flexibility now. Our site is built in such a way, it’s modular, we can change not just the configuration of the home page but we’ve got a half dozen different story templates that we can play around with, not all of which we’ve employed yet, to really think about different types of stories, different ways in which we want to approach different types of content, and the whole WordPress system with the menus and the widgets and all that kind of stuff… We’re still learning as we go and there’s still lots more we can do with it, but it’s so much easier than some of the other CMSes that we’ve used in the past and it just kind of makes you want to play with it, and invites experimentation in a way that I’ve not experienced with websites before.

Karen:

You mentioned a word that always makes my ears perk up, which is “modular.” Maybe you could both, if you have thoughts on how a modular system applies to your publication, or to the work that you’re doing, or to the responsive process—it’s something that always comes up so frequently and I’m always just sort of intrigued to hear—what do you think modular means or what’s the benefit of having a modular design system?

Paul:

Generally speaking, modular has always been part of our way of working at Creative Review. I’ve always put print magazines together with grids, and with the jump to the web, it seemed like a natural thing to incorporate grids there. And obviously the whole responsive requirements with basically a small grid morphing to a larger grid, again, it would seem crazy not to make use of that facility in our plans and drawings.

Patrick:

I think as well, from the editorial perspective, it’s about emphasis. Online, yes, we do some very kind of short stories, which are just “Here’s a new thing we thought you’d like, have a look at it,” through to 2,500 to 3,000-word essays or reviews or interviews. The frustration with previous systems was being able to get over to the audience that breadth of content and the idea that we’re not just about one particular type of story here, you can find the different kinds of levels of content according to what you’re interested in or the time of day you’re accessing the site.

The great thing about the system we have now is to be able to switch those things around. We’re starting to explore a different configuration for the weekend, for example, or a different configuration for a certain time of day. That kind of adaptability, there’s no way you could have done that in the past. But you still need to be able to control it and to be able to have it in a regulated form, and in a way that, whatever you do to it, it’s still going to look good and still going to represent the brand well. So having that system with a great deal of structure and then, on top of that, a lot of options, is a really nice balance to have. It’s kind of difficult to make the thing look horrible.

Karen:

I’d like to ask now about how you might engage the rest of the organization in the design review process. Ethan and I spoke to one publisher that described how challenging it was for other people on the team who were used to only looking at very, very finished mock-ups to be invited into a design process that now they were asked to review work in progress, they were asked to review a prototype, they had to review the website at different breakpoints and give feedback across a range of different sizes and layouts. Can you talk about how other people at Creative Review engaged with the process and gave you feedback on the design?

Patrick:

I think we did try to involve everyone at every stage. It’s not always easy if you’re bringing in people who aren’t necessarily visual or aren’t necessarily used to looking at different design options and can maybe get kind of hung up on something which is at a formative stage or you’re trying to say, “It’ll look a bit like this, but not exactly like this.” And then when the final website came out, I think there was a bit of—not pushback, but some people were kind of surprised with some of the configurations and we had to sort of talk them through, “No, no, no, remember, we can do it this way, we can do it that way, we can still make this work.” And again, getting across the idea that things weren’t fixed anymore, that the home page, for example, doesn’t always have to have one big story at the top followed by a grid of three and three; we can change this stuff around, we can play around with this, we can experiment with this.

I think from the commercial team’s point of view, once they began to understand the options, they got really excited about that, and certainly commercially it’s been a fantastic success so far in that they had so much more that they were able to go to potential partners or advertisers with rather than in the past it would have simply been about banners and MPUs and that was it. There’s so many more things that we can do now, whether if we’re working on a responsive project and we can use the widgets to drive traffic to those pages or talk about those projects in a much better way than we were able to before.

One thing we’ve introduced now with our landing pages is sponsorship on the landing pages, where commercial partners can have branding on the landing page plus they can have responsive content, which is kind of clearing flagged up that it comes from them; they can have their apps there and exclusivity over the ads being served in certain places. So, there’s all these different options and I think it was great to see how the commercial team became aware of that as we had talked about and it really sort of fired their imaginations about all the possibilities that there were.

But yeah, it’s always difficult when you’ve got people who come from different mindsets working on a project who can’t always necessarily imagine the possibilities. I guess there’s always a danger that you’ve shown them something which isn’t finished and that’s what fixes itself in their minds.

Karen:

Well, I love hearing stories of a responsive redesign engaging the ad sales or the sponsorship team as well, because personally I think there’s a lot of business value that can be gained by thinking of the content in packages and different devices in different ways, so I’m thrilled to hear that you’ve found that as well.

Patrick:

Yeah, definitely. We try to make sure that all those concerns were thought about and dealt with during the design process, because otherwise you end up designing sites and then people try and shoehorn ad spaces into things where it wasn’t meant to be. So, as much as possible we were trying to sit down at the beginning of the process with our commercial team and say, “Okay, what do you need from this?” We know what we need from it, but let’s all try and work on this together and design everything in from the word go rather than just, “Here’s the editorial design, now your ads can go here, here, but not there and there.” You can’t really work in that way anymore.

Karen:

Hear, hear! So, I’d be interested to know how you think about evaluating or measuring the success of this redesign. How do you look at data or statistics or analytics to know if this redesign is doing its job?

Patrick:

That’s a good question. I’m always quite addicted to having the analytics open all day every day and feverishly looking at how stories are doing and so on. But I think what we’re hoping for this from the user perspective is kind of a deeper engagement, and certainly engagement with older content. So, to try and get off the treadmill of feeling like we’ve constantly got to stick new stuff up there all day every day and trying to get people to spend a little longer with it.

So, we’ll be looking at very closely at that side of things and that side of engagement. Certainly from the commercial perspective, obviously there’s a measure of success there in terms of revenue and renewals; and I mentioned about the sponsored sections, looking at how those perform for people, whether they’re getting what they want out of them, whether we need to tweak those for the future. So, I think what we’re not just relying on obviously is just crude traffic numbers. I think what we’re hoping out of this is really it’s going to have a positive effect in terms of the brand rather than just a spike in the number of page views. We do Call to the Audience research—so the site, we just did one lot, but that was before the site had launched, so what we’ll really be looking at is the next round which we’ll get to towards the end of the year, which will include things like net promoter score and some real direct feedback from users and some analysis of how we’re performing against other titles in our market. We’re hoping to see a certain metrics given a boost when we get that back.

Karen:

Well, as we reach the end of our time here, I’d like to ask both of you if you have any advice for other listeners—so, perhaps another publisher that might be listening to this episode. What have you learned from this process that you’d like to pass on to other people?

Paul:

I think, as Patrick said, probably the value of getting designs onto browsers early and sharing them with everybody so that everybody is behind it. And don’t forget the grid. [laughs]

Patrick:

I think definitely trying to involve everyone who has a view on this and everyone who has input as much as possible, as early as possible, really letting them feel like they can make a contribution, so it’s not just editorially-led or commercially-led.

And I think one thing that we hopefully have demonstrated, and certainly something that has come back very, very strongly in all the reactions we’ve had from our audience, is the value of using type as a real point of difference. Underneath our site—the nuts and bolts and the mechanics of how our site works, and the different themes and templates and so on—is very similar to other publishing brands within our company. But you wouldn’t think it looking at the end result, and a lot of that has got to do with the use of type and really allowing the type to express the personality of the brand. I think a lot of time with redesigns there’s still a nervousness about, “Well, we can’t use any kind of bespoke typeface or anything that’s not just from the regular list of web-approved typefaces because someone somewhere might not be able to view it properly.” I think obviously it helps with our kind of audience, but I think we were able to show just how much you can do and how strong a brand you can convey with the use of type online.

Karen:

Well, I totally agree with you on all of those points. That’s a fantastic round-up of some insights that you’ve gained. Patrick, Paul, it’s really been a pleasure having you on the show. I’m very impressed with the work that you’ve done and it’s always a pleasure to see a beautiful design-focused publication go responsive. So, thank you.

Patrick:

Thank you, Karen. It was a real pleasure talking to you. Thanks very much.

Paul:

Thank you.

Karen:

Thanks to everyone for listening to this episode of a responsive web design podcast. Thanks also to our sponsor, GatherContent. Go to gathercontent.com and take control of your content production process.

If your company wants to go responsive but you need help getting started, Ethan and I offer a two-day onsite workshop to help you make it happen. Visit responsivewebdesign.com/workshop to find out more and let us know your company is interested.

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Thanks for listening, and we’ll be back next week.