Wired Magazine Redesign

[Brett_Tabke]

Wired Magazine - the nations #1 tech magazine and the #1 magazine read by 15-30 males in the US - redesigned the magazine this month and also small changes to the site this week.

[wired.com...]

Redesigning a magazine is like upgrading your OS -- change is good, but you still want the thing to be familiar.

That's the spirit behind the new look we debut this month.

Spearheaded by creative director Scott Dadich, who joined Wired last spring from Texas Monthly, the redesign is based on a simple premise: expand our use of provocative photography and inventive illustration while maintaining our tradition of innovative typography and design pioneered by John Plunkett in 1993.

[rogerd]

I enjoy Wired, and actually subscribe to the physical magazine. I give them high marks for creativity, although occasionally readability suffers when they use fonts that are too small or are too similar to the background color.

I find it interesting that the magazine is really out there with its design, while the Web version is almost minimalist.

[encyclo]

Wired's site was one of the pioneers in switching to an all CSS design back in 2002 - it combined XHTML and CSS positioning with a pretty rigorous approach (for the time) to semantics.

This new design abandons the XHTML entirely, and the page now doesn't even have a doctype - depending on quirks mode in the browser. Semantics are out of the window too, with the top menu being nothing but a bunch of images fused together with adjacent anchors with no separators - an accessibility no-no and competely unnecessary when using semantic lists is a tried and tested accessible alternative. Tables are also back in vogue, even if not for the main content areas.

It is rather unfortunate that the update was done with little or no attention to recommended best practices, especially as they benefit from years of attention (and associated massive link-love) for their 2002 design's trailblazing approach.

There are some upsides to the design in terms of usability, though, in particular that the design is less dominant and much clearer - the simplicity of the approach is to the designer's credit. It brings back the focus on the content. However, from a technical perspective, the end result is a disappointment.