People who make websites know that the work doesn’t magically end after the initial launch. We’ve been busy working on a laundry list of bugs, tweaks, and enhancements since the new design debuted a week ago, and the release of a new issue seemed like a good opportunity to deploy the new style sheets.
Most of the changes involve tweaking the line-heights, font-sizes, and margins in the various breakpoints to make the site look tighter and more consistent. For example, author images on Column headers have been halved in size in the smaller breakpoints, which, along with smaller and tighter type for the titles, makes the whole arrangement more practical.
Some of the more interesting changes involve the web fonts. We’ve changed the typeface to Georgia Pro in places where we use the numero character, since we had fallback problems using the glyph in Franklin (and the Georgia Pro glyph is very nice, as well). We’ve enabled a couple of font-feature settings for old-style numbers and ligatures in the article body type—leveraging some of the OpenType features of Georgia Pro—although support for these features is mixed across browsers at present. Also, we’re experimenting with using Georgia Pro Condensed in the smallest breakpoint, to see if layouts are enhanced by fitting in more characters, and thus more words, per line. (Hat tip to Nick Sherman for this suggestion and other typographic consultation.)
Another change, per user reporting, was to substitute SVG images for the search and social icons.
We hope you find the style changes an improvement, and we’re interested in your feedback, including any bug reports. We’ll be continuing to work to improve the site and build upon the this latest relaunch as the year progresses.
Looking good so far guys! Keep up the good work. 😀
Are you not using avg icons for search on the mobile size breakpoints? They look like pixelly pngs on Android Chrome.
That is SVG of course.
I’m excited to see that ALA is making online reading SO much more user friendly. Mike, I’m hoping that maybe you could chime in on my question “Has the redesign of AListApart.com had significant impact on user engagement?” I posted recently on Quora.
I’m curious if the redesign has impacted engagement metrics, such as time on page/site, average pages per visit, repeat visitors, etc.
http://www.abload.de/img/bildschirmfoto2013-028fk4g.png
is this intended? Otherwise this is a bug in the latest version of crome and sth is broken.
Crome:
Version 24.0.1312.57
Mac OS X 10.8.2
@Michael N ✅
We are using SVG for the search icon in all the breakpoints, but the fallback is a standard resolution PNG. Might be a caching issue? Are you getting SVG elsewhere on the page (graphic elements in footer, for instance)? Otherwise, please contact us with more details about browser version and so forth. Thanks!
Your header is still clipped.
The Condensed Font doesn’t look very good to me. At first sight it seemed as if the font was scaled incorrectly :-/
Great Job – The style changes are definitely an improvement, the fonts are looking good.
@Jesse Wallace Yes.
The header is certainly a good way to tell that there is something apart here.