USA TODAY leads the way in design once again
Recently, USA TODAY underwent a radical redesign, replacing their existing logo with a blue dot and revamping the layout of their entire paper. While this redesign may be easy to mock, it is an appealing refresh of America’s 2nd largest paper. It also says a lot about the state of the American news industry, because USA TODAY has, since its creation, been a pioneer in American news.
USA TODAY is not known for being a particularly academic or erudite paper. However, these qualities are part of what helped USA TODAY revolutionize print news. While high brow papers emphasized quality reporting for sophisticated audiences and low brow tabloids used sensationalism, USA TODAY tried to present important news in as simple and appealing a manner as possible. This design choice was not due to a desire to better inform the public. In its first issue in 1982, a letter from USA TODAY’s founder, Al Neuharth, boasted that the new paper would be “refreshing and rewarding to the nation’s advertisers”. In other words, USA TODAY has always emphasized selling as many papers as possible. The remarkable aspect of this strategy is that it chose to singlemindedly focus on selling papers by covering actual news, rather than entertainment news or gossip.
USA TODAY’s naked emphasis on profit marked the end of an era where news organizations still valued journalistic integrity over revenue streams. Now, with the advent of lots of cable news stations that provide more entertainment than insight, news’ organizations desire for profit is obvious. The fact that USA TODAY sells so well indicates that it remains extremely good at accomplishing its original mission.
USA TODAY’s emphases on design, flashy graphics, and stories from across the US have been emulated to a degree by other papers. The New York Times for example, has for years posted informative and impressive multimedia content on its website. While many of the graphs in USA today are showy but horribly misleading, The New York Times has done a good job combining impressive visuals with good representation of data.
With its redesign however, USA TODAY has once again passed its peers. Its logo varies depending on the news of the day, a flashy touch for the paper, and the heading font has been changed to a variant of the font Futura, an eye-catching sans-serif for the digital age. What really separates USA TODAY however, is the webpage.
The new USA TODAY webpage overflows with javascript doodads. Articles fade out, menus slide out, and different sections subtly fade in different colors when one mouses over them. The articles can be arranged in multiple views and light up when one mouses over them. You can even click arrows on the sides of the page to switch from one section to another, as if the website was a physical paper with pages. This video sums up just how animated the website is.
The real importance of the new website however, is the compatibility with tablets. The simplified mobile version is designed for tablet viewing. While revenue from tablets remains small compared to other sources, it is fair to assume that it will be a huge growth area. Other websites may soon follow USA TODAY’s more animated approach, making it a pioneer once again.