So for the past five months or so we’ve been working on a redesign for the Lawrence Journal-World. For those of you that don’t know, it’s a daily newspaper that circulates the town of Lawrence, Kansas. It’s quite small compared to surrounding markets which makes it very agile and free from shareholders and their evil agendas.
I had a feeling this project would be special and challenging but I had no idea of the scale. Turns out, around the same time I was tasked with designing Marketplace, a directory of 4000+ local businesses. I must also mention, news doesn’t stop for redesigns. It’s definitely a juggling act when your trying to complete a site thats constantly having to push out news features and various timely events like local elections. There were, shall I say, growing pains. Details aside, the design is simple. In fact the design is designed to disappear. Content is what really matters so I decided to take an approach that would make the overall design feel supportive rather than overbearing. This isn’t easy for anyone and requires extreme discipline. Discipline I never thought I had.
The site will continue to take shape over time. We’re hoping that redesigns are a thing of the past and constant iterations are a thing of the future. We’ll see how long that lasts ;-) This project wouldn’t have been possible without the involvement of James Bennett, Dan Cox, Jeff Croft, Matt Croydon, Jacob Kaplan-Moss, Joel Mathis, Christian Metts, David Ryan, Tom Tobin, all the web producers and all the editors and reporters that allow us to do what we do.