It's fresh, it's exciting

Today we launch our new-look article design, the result of much thinking, discussion, reader feedback and – you’d better believe it – work. It’s the first stage of an overall freshening up of the site to be rolled out in the coming months, and coincides with a redesign of our mobile offering and columnist layouts.

Article design

The first design principle, and most important, is readability. We want your reading experience to be as pleasurable as possible. The font has been improved and the column width widened to assist in that regard. Most Popular Articles, Events and Jobs have been moved to a new spot underneath the articles.

Comments are still there, but only the first couple will appear automatically, with the option to view all comments for those who want to read them and engage – which, as always, we strongly encourage. Our social media sharing buttons are now on the top left of the main article, and newsletter and social media sign-ups are located at the top right of the article pages, next to Stay Informed.

Lead images will now come in two varieties: a magazine-style layout, with screen-wide images, and a newsier picture layout for all other stories.

Another change you’ll notice is to our related articles – these now appear at the end of articles, as opposed to down the right-hand side, with greater flexibility for editors to curate related articles on the topics they think will be of most interest to our readers.

Mobile

Also launching today is a new-look mobile design, again with far greater emphasis on readability. We appreciate a growing number of our readers access articles through mobile devices, whether tablets or phones, and wanted to acknowledge that in the way those articles appear.

Principles at the core of what we do – author disclosure statements, partner institutions and author profiles – are still there, and still integral, but – again – we want to get the main article content to you as quickly and effectively as possible.

Columns

The third and final change at this stage is to our columnist pages, based on much feedback and discussion. Our columnists have a loyal following, and we wanted to draw a greater distinction between those pieces and our regular Comment and Analysis articles.

With that in mind, we’ve redesigned the column landing pages, giving more prominence to the “who” as well as the “what”, while giving better, more intuitive access to each columnist’s body of work.

We’re very pleased to be able to offer these changes and hope they add to the quality of your experience. Please do let us know what you think. And enjoy!