patrícia furtado

In the process of designing a website with lots of different bits of information, I found myself doing some research on online newspapers.

Because internet surfers don’t usually navigate very deep into websites, online newspapers try to display as many snippets of content and news stories as they possibly can on their homepage, trying to lure visitors in, in the same way newspaper covers do.

Newspapers have always been somehow reluctant to change. Tradition conveys credibility, and brings some sort of comfort to the regular reader. Changing the way things look, the way contents are organised, the order in which they appear is a risky thing for a newspaper, and that’s maybe why they never seems to stray too far from each other in terms of design and layout.

I wasn’t surprised to see that the same happens with the online versions. I visited the websites of some of the major European and American newspapers and found out that most use the same solutions and layouts. While it does improve usability, I can’t help but to feel this spontaneous standardisation has been taken a bit too far.

Here’s the recipe for a online newspaper that won’t stand out from the crowd:
- white background (almost no exceptions here);
- logo left aligned or centered (extra points if you use a black-letter font in the logo)
- horizontal tabbed navigation, usually in two lines, the top line being used for the main sections;
- banner advert over or immediately below the header;
- smaller banner in line with the logo;
- three or four uneven columns;
- black type for plain text;
- article titles set in Georgia, in blue;

This last rule puzzles me the most, because it seems somewhat random. Just notice how many major newspapers use it: UK’s Guardian, Independent, Times, Mirror, France’s Le Monde, Spain’s El Pais, Italy’s La stampa, Portugal’s Público, and United State’s New York Times, Herald Tribune and The Wall Street Journal.

In terms of web fonts, there is a very limited choice, but that’s no longer true when it comes to colours. Georgia is both a readable and respectable font, but even when a different font like Verdana is chosen, greyish blue is the colour of news titles in the overwhelming majority of newspaper websites, black and red being the only other colours allowed.

So, if you ever have to design a website for a newspaper, and decide to go with green, brown or even orange titles for the news articles, beware: the webfashion police is likely to come after you, and you’ll never get away with it!