Our Garcia Media collaborations with The Hindu Group in Chennai, India, date back to a first visit in 2005, then in 2013. For the past year, our team has worked closely with the editors, designers and digital teams of both The Hindu and its sister newspaper, Business Line, to revitalize the titles, train the editors in the new modes of mobile storytelling, and, of course, rethinking the design of all the platforms.
The new print design for both The Hindu and Business Line has launched, as we discussed in a previous blog.
Now, the digital rethink of The Hindu has launched this week and, again, we are extremely happy with the way the team worked closely with us, exchanging ideas, trying new concepts and, eventually, emerging with a look and feel, content organization and navigational strategies that we hope readers will find functional and attractive.
Take a look at the new design for The Hindu website here:
How it all began
Before we sketched the first concept we were researching the landscape of the media in India, starting with the make up of its population.
India is the second most populated country in the world with nearly a fifth of the world’s population. According to the 2022 revision of the World Population Prospects[1][2] the population stood at 1,407,563,842. India has more than 50% of its population below the age of 25 and more than 65% below the age of 35. In 2020, the average age of an Indian is 29 years, compared to 37 for China and 48 for Japan.
The Reuters Institute report helped us create a more youthful concept, emphasize better mobile storytelling strategies, and start moving the newsroom toward a mobile-first approach. Specifically, the report open the doors for publishers to be more open to change:
This move presents Indian publishers with a range of important opportunities including developing their mobile offerings, their news alerts, and their email newsletters to better serve domestic and overseas audiences, as well as the opportunity to leverage distributed discovery to reach people who do not come direct to publishers. It also presents them with clear challenges, as digital media become a more and more important part of the overall Indian media landscape, competition for attention and advertising will intensify, and legacy publishers used to dominating their home market will face intensified competition from smaller digital-born new entrants and, most importantly, from large platform companies.
The creative process
Here is how The Hindu’s website looked at the start of our process:
Armed with that research, a robust briefing from the editors and designers, working closely with project manager Pundi S Sriram,and plenty of discussions internally with the Garcia Media team senior art directors for this project, Rodrigo Fino and Paula Ripoll, of our Buenos Aires GM Latinamerica office, we sketched the first concepts, which follow here:
From the start, we wanted to create a better navigational system, present one image as the lead piece, while offering users the opportunity to identify other stories of interest. The image above was our first sketch, and, as you can see, many of those concepts stayed through all our design discussions leading to the launch. Here is the design as it appears:
Key elements of the design
Nothing is more important in the design of a website that making it functional. That process starts with easy navigation, and, also important, labeling. Our system of labeling can use red flash lines for geographic or thematic references as we see here:
The latest news
For a daily newspaper, presenting its audience with a quick access “latest news” element is key. We present that to the right of the lead piece on the home page:
Top news today
The best marketing a daily newspaper can use is the practice of updating news all the time. That is what subscribers demand, and in a 24/7 news cycle, it is a requirement. So, in addition to the Latest News, we have created a Top of the News basket, adding urgency to how information architecture plays a role in this design:
Opinions
The Hindu is an iconic newspaper in its region, the south of India, with a long and distinguished journalistic tradition of great opinion writers contributing to its editorial pages. That is why we gave Opinion pieces special treatment on the new website:
The Hindu Explains
Readers today are aware that the world they live in is complicated. They expect their newspapers and magazines to make sense of it all, to analyze and to explain, thus the need for a section like this:
Top Picks
Here goes the curated content that the editors have selected as special:
It is also important to remind readers of content they may have missed:
Special content design
Here is how we create a look and feel that immediately identifies the content as special:
The article page
We know that a large nunber of readers come to a newspaper website via social media, linking to specific content, and not necessarily entering thru the home page. That is why we have paid special attention to making the article page a sort of second home page, promoting other stories that may be of interest to the reader:
The avatar
Important to create an element of branding that can be used to identify the publication, especially via mobile platforms:
Design style components
The grid
How the grid works across platforms: desktop, tablet, mobile:
Typographic palette
Color palette
Before and after
Bring our mobile storytelling workshop to your newsroom
It is a mobile world, and 82% of all content is consumed on a mobile device worldwide, not just news, but all sorts of documents, especially pdfs. If your company is in the business of creating content, then you need to start thinking from small to large. Create that content for the smallest platform, where a majority of the users are consuming it.
Our Garcia Media Mobile Storytelling workshops are proven to introduce your editorial team to the way we write, edit and design for mobile platforms. It is a one-day program that involves a presentation (where I summarize my Columbia University class content), and follow it with a hands on workshop.
I urge you to consult my latest book, The Story, a trilogy full of tips and explanations about mobile storytelling, which represents the latest genre for journalists to explore. See information below:
The full trilogy of The Story now available–3 books to guide you through a mobile first strategy. Whether you’re a reporter, editor, designer, publisher, corporate communicator, The Story is for you! https://amazon
Volume 1: Transformation
https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-story-volume-i/id1480169411
Volume Two: Storytelling
https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-story-volume-ii/id1484581220
Volume Three: Design
https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-story-volume-iii/id1497049918
Order the print edition of The Story, from Amazon, here:
The Story, en español:
TheMarioBlog post # 3359