Portfolio
The Hindu
Problem
The Hindu is India’s leading English-language daily with 130 year history of being a classic, elegant, and traditional newspaper. The challenge in 2005 when Garcia Media was undertaking the print redesign was to modernize the paper, attracting new readers while not undoing all of the things that made the newspaper an icon in Indian journalism. The ad slogan for the successful 2005 print redesign became “Always Classic, Always Contemporary.” But that mantra did not translate to The Hindu’s web presence. The Hindu’s website lacked much of the tone and personality of the newspaper, and other than the logo could not be identified as the digital partner of the modern, yet elegant print product. The challenge here was to translate what The Hindu has been in print for the last 130 years to a new digital audience who are familiar with the strong brand, whether they read it in print or know their parents or grandparent read it, and have an expectation of the highest quality journalism with clean and elegant design.
Process
Managing Director N. Murali and Editor-in-Chief N. Ram understood their readers’ media needs, and they also understood the importance of developing their brand online, and so they set their own high expectations for this redesign. This was not going to be a simple re-skinning of their current website. In several visits to The Hindu’s offices in Chennai, India we worked with project leader and Hindu’s New Media Director Nagaraj Nagabushanam to train the editorial staff in multimedia storytelling. This was not going to be a newspaper with a website anymore, but a true multimedia news organization. That vision and the steps that were taken towards that goal drove the design forward.
The process began with a full content inventory and the development of a new information architecture that would reduce the number of items in the navigation bar and create a simpler system of getting through the site and through the vast content offered by The Hindu. By creating three levels of navigation, we were able to focus one level on the actual topics, one level for the functions of the site and the third level as a drop down to find the news on a geographic basis.
One of the goals of the redesign was to reduce the clutter that was common on many Indian news sites. Not only was the clutter not aligned with the simple elegance that defined The Hindu’s print product, but it also made navigating the homepage a bit more difficult. The first part of this mean establishing ad placements that were still effective while not getting in the way of the editorial content. Using the Internet Advertising Bureau’s ad standards, we designed the editorial around the ads that would be necessary to have on the page.
Working on a grid, also helped give the page a clean and organized look while providing modules at the bottom of the page to highlight the stories from the other sections of the site.
Outcome
While the launch is in beta stage, the response from users has been overwhelmingly positive. Said N. Ram about the redesign: “I am delighted with the advanced website design Mario Garcia, Jr. has created. He worked closely with our editorial and technical teams, was sensitive to our ideas and specific editorial and technical requirements. He has given us a classical – pure, elegant, and uncluttered – yet contemporary, design. Too many newspaper websites look too busy, all over the place. Working closely with our technical coordinator, Nagaraj Nagabushanam, Mario, Jr. quietly pushed us into going for more ambitious features than we originally had in mind. For example, topic-based exploratory and research capability, which to my knowledge no other Indian newspaper website has at this stage.”