Half-way through 2012, I was offered to lead the project of redesigning Hipertextual, a media network which at the time was formed by 15+ different blogs that delivered daily news for millions of people in Spain and Latin America.
The original brief was simple: “We have a huge reach in both Spain and LATAM and the advertising industry needs to take us more seriously. We stopped being just a bunch of blogs a long time ago, we are a strong and reliable media outlet and we need to portray that.”
This was my first professional project as a digital designer.
The clearest path at the time was ditching the classic blog layout and we spent a lot of time rethinking our homepage. Showcasing the latest news, improving its way-finding, readability, and user engagement. It needed to be a flexible design, that could work for the many topics we covered throughout the sites.
Working on this project made me aware of the many aspects at play involved in online editorial designing. You want your reader to have the most delightful experience, but you also need to increase their engagement with your page to boost page views, visitors, and overall reach, all while taking very good care of your advertising space and quality.
We reached a pretty good ground base early on, but this project never stopped. We kept iterating over and over again to improve its performance and quality as much as possible. This redesign made Hipertextual stand out from its competitors and, along with the great content the editorial team created daily, we experienced a huge increase in audience, clients, and revenue.
Iteration proposal
A few months before I left Hipertextual I began working on a new redesign proposal.
A year before that we decided to merge all the different sites into a single one, to group our audience under a single roof and unify editorial efforts. We ditched Hipertextual's most famous brand, ALT1040, and took the name of the company as the new media brand. A year passed and it was crystal clear we had made a great call but our web design, that was meant to cover a single topic, struggled with all these new topics scrambled together.
My intention was to make each topic stand out on its own and break the mould in terms of layout. It wasn't the most developed concept but I remember enjoying the time I spent reinventing the site.
