Liking the Slate Redesign - A Lot

David Card | June 28, 2006, 10:29 PM

Slate's ten years old. It's always been one of my favorite web zines. I even paid for it once. Its redesign pretty much rocks.

- I don't like widescreen, but I'm in the minority. The bigger fonts look great on my widescreen Mac at home.
- Pull out menus work much more effectively, and they work on Macs and on Firefox. Death to ActiveX.
- Still a good mix of promotion (via graphics, typefaces, and clever headlines, as we all learned back in the day) and calendarized posts. "Briefing" up high is brilliant.
- Slate does "most blogged" right -- take that, NY Times -- and actually links to Technorati so you can see the related posts.

Minor quibbles:

- Inside, on article pages, it's still all editorial promotions and virtually no contextual relevance. Boo, hiss. I'm for a mix.
- Search still stinks.
- Pretty minimal acknowledgement of the modern "Website, deconstruct thyself" mantra. (See Fig 10.) Get on it, guys.

I miss the old logo. But my mousepad's eBay collector's value just went up.