The Style section - Creating a digital identity
Style’s relaunch aimed to reintroduced a classic part of The Washington Post that previously existed only in the print newspaper to digital readers, providing an alternative to “hard news.” The goal was to distinguish the Style section from the rest of the Post with a bold and refreshing brand and visual forward story presentations to reach a younger, more diverse audiences.
Role
Lead product designer, led end-to-end product design and handoff.
Collaborated with news graphic design team to finalize visual branding.
Teams
Executive newsroom leadership, features editors and team, news graphic design, product, photography, video, news analytics, SEO, engineering, social, ads, marketing and product design
Timeframe
March to September 2023
The Brief
The Style section has historically been a much beloved section of the Post’s newspaper, giving readers a break from the standard cycle of hard news and a peak inside the power centers of media, politics, entertainment and fashion. Currently the Style section has no digital identity, so relaunching the section online gives us the opportunity to reintroduce a classic part of The Washington Post to digital readers with increased focus, metabolism and timeliness.
Goals of this work include:
Relaunch the Style section with five core areas of focus: media, politics, fashion, entertainment and style.
More clearly distinguish Style stories from the rest of The Post’s coverage, introducing a bespoke design for digital and print.
Design digital article presentations that put emphasis on photography, video and other visual story telling formats and incorporate the new Style branding.
Show the elasticity of the template through thematic adjustments to an article ranging from a base story to a highly visual cover story.
Identify what elements on an article page are affected by a theme, and explore how we can make the theming system flexible for reuse with other themes and brands in the future while still integrating with the current article architecture.
Create a reusable topper system that can be used across all different types of article templates, and be easily manipulated by the theme.
Early Research / Context / Competitive analysis and explorations
The research and planning for this Style section started in late 2022 within the news team, and slowly expanded to include more teams for collaboration as they finalized the content and launch strategy for the section. I was pulled into the project in March of 2023 at which point the news graphic design team had mid-fidelity concepts of mood boards and color palettes and user research was being conducted by the in-house research team on potential audiences and brand association. As a lot of teams had been collaborating already on this project, there was a very accelerated ramp up to get caught up to the decisions and ideas thus far when I joined the project.
During the early discovery portion of this project I:
Conducted an internal audit of our current article system and it’s limitations and other sections of The Post that have unique branding.
Conducted a competitive analysis of other news and non-news organizations digital publications with visual forward narrative content, and examples of theming injections into digital products
Collaborated with news graphic design team to make decisions about color palette and mood board direction.
Used crazy 8s and other ideation activities to brainstorm early paper prototypes and wireframes of new article toppers
The Concepts
Due to accelerated project deadlines, I moved quickly from wireframes to mid and high fidelity prototypes that could be presented to newsroom leadership. I created many new visual forward story toppers, and iterated to create many different examples of how flexible the theming system I was presenting could be to give the Style, and future, teams an exponential number of configurations. These configurations utalized the new Style palette and art direction from the news graphic design team with new article toppers and themable article body elements to create a visually impactful but reusable system for the engineering team that built upon our existing article template system. The hardest aspect of this project was balancing the new Style team’s want of unique and visually stunning presentations with product and engineering’s technical restrictions and goal to make whatever we built reusable and easily maintained.
Feedback and iterations
This was a very high profile project, requiring the new designs and prototypes to be presented continuously to all levels of The Post’s leadership and across the company. I received feedback and critiques from all, fielding what was actionable and what was not. I continued to iterate based on critiques and evolving scope as the launch deadline approached
Final designs
The final design included a new theme-able centered layout article system, theme-able article body elements (drop caps, block quotes and pull quotes), two new article toppers and visual improvements to existing article toppers.
You can find some of my favorite applications of these new designs in the stories below:
The Results
The Style section officially launched September 12, 2023. Data from two months post launch:
Readers engaged longer with stories that were more highly designed, with average engagement time for a Style story at 1 min 13 sec (46% longer than the average Post story at 50 seconds)
In the first month after launch, total page views were 13% higher than the median for 2023 (16M vs. 14M), more page views than any other month in 2023
Subscriber conversions for launch month were more than double the median for 2023, more conversions than any other month in the last year.
Reader comments: “The Style section! The execution has been great – such engaging stories and format. The big, bold pictures makes everything seem more modern – especially for the fashion week’s section. Totally revitalized the Post website. Congrats to the entire team.”