Reader

Reader is a news portal that focuses on seamless news reporting.

With a clear identity and a core motto of 'we write first, you read first', the Reader seeks to be established in the contemporary news era with the primary goal to be the first source of information for its audience, by winning their trust and loyalty.

The redesign of the new Reader has emphasized creating a clean site that will be easy to use, simple and fast for the readers while focusing on the importance of the latest news in both desktop and mobile versions.

In this context, we based the new logo on Reader's featured yellow color and aesthetically integrated it based on modern trends. At the same time, we ensured to leverage the medium's identity, which focuses on its editor's belief that the beginning and the end of its existence belong to each reader and so, we pointed out the “r” that the logo starts and the reversed one that closes with.

The main colors of the website are black and white to enhance its cleanness and readability, with blue and yellow alluring the reader with their illuminating essence. Blue, as a secondary color, symbolizes all the must-have values of news reporting, such as responsibility, honesty and reliability. At the same time, we kept the playful yellow color as an accent to captivate, excite, and charm with ease, while creating a warm effect that boosts creativity and symbolizes intellect. The design of this website is based on a minimalistic approach where the importance is laid on the news stories, so we chose linear shapes combined with round typography to create a visual balance for the readers.

The Reader, fully adapted to the requirements of a news website, tries to cover all the different preferences of its demanding audience, including primary content, analyses, commentary, reports, tributes, video content, opinions, podcasts and interviews covering multiple subjects for politics, entertainment, lifestyle, technology, etc.

Among others, we focused on the user’s experience, meaning easy navigation and access - via an open menu, a burger and a sidebar that work as navigation tools to the current affairs -, a fast and simple website, while always having in mind what is important for both the medium and the users.

To highlight the content, we paid great attention to creating a website where all these important stories could pop out. Therefore, the latest news section is placed in a way that the reader has always easy access to, being expanded and sticky on the right on the desktop and visualized as a sticky button on the bottom of mobile devices.

The homepage of Reader is now clearly structured according to its content with a complete overview of what is happening 24/7. A variation of different teasers is chosen to represent the content in order to emphasize its diversity and keep the audience's attention while staying consistent with the basic guidelines and maintaining the medium's newly obtained elegance.

Some new, innovative sections were introduced to enhance the readers' holistic experience. 'My news' block offers the user the ability to search for and read all the latest news on a specific topic of their own interest. The 'Special' section, including special tributes, feature articles and analyses with an emphasis on multiple multimedia types, upgrades the reader's journey to current affairs, sharing primary information and greater depth of details. The 'Trends' column is dedicated to topics that the public turns into viral, while the columns 'Maximilianos' and 'Telecontrol' reveal daily behind-the-scenes information that often remains unpublished.

Drupal 9 was a one-way street concerning the CMS of choice to make editors' lives easier with its usable, accessible, inclusive, flexible, scalable and user-friendly environment.

As of the second month of its new digital journey, the Reader is already closer to its primary goals. The positive changes on the website and its results are already concrete; a 35% traffic increase, almost perfect core web vitals and impressive speed metrics are just the beginning for this medium which finds its own way in the very competitive and demanding news portals industry.