At the very moment Barack Obama was sworn in by Chief Justice John Roberts, his IT department flipped the switch on a brand-new Whitehouse homepage. Any designers out there want to weigh in?
Here's a screen-cap of the old design, which was functional but staid. Suffice it to say that it's been cleared away. The new site has all the features you'd expect of top-notch interactive design: Media and traffic-grabbing hotspots prominently displayed; clean graphics; a blog (yes, a blog) on the left-hand side; policy positions to the right of that; and a comprehensive selection of links below. In short, it's not one of those sites that you'll have to drill into very deeply to get at the information you want. Take a look.
Related Stories: | Topics:Innovation, Technology, Design, whitehouse.gov redesign, Obama design, interactive design, Barack Obama, John Roberts (Chief Justice) |
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Recent Comments | 12 Total
January 20, 2009 at 4:12pm by Allyson Kapin
I think the new Whitehouse.gov website is beautifully designed and captures the branding President Obama’s team worked so hard on during his election campaign. More importantly it’s clean and easy to navigate. In the next few weeks and months I hope the site will not only be used to promote the Administrations legislative agenda but to use it as an engagement tool and connect to the people.
January 20, 2009 at 4:19pm by Cliff Kuang
Hey Seamus---I think you're right on with the type treatments—the font in the middle (so sort of Verdana knock off?) lacks the dignity of the sans-serifs above and below. Even a serif font would have worked better there. These sorts of shortfalls seem weirdly common—for some reason, first-rate typography has been one of the last things to reach the notice of interactive designers.
January 20, 2009 at 4:20pm by Seamus Holman
Beautiful navigation, full access to most of the site from almost anywhere. Love the rich footer too. But the typography in the middle of the page looks a little "eh". Under the blog, "read this post" is squeezed too tight to the teaser and under agenda, the spacing is too generous. Also, what's up the the artifacts in the header image (around White House and President Barack Obama)?
But I'm impressed it's up at all, and surely the blog will get lots more design attention once they start posting more frequently. The quality of the navigation and general design sensibility more than makes up for the problems with some of the typography.
January 20, 2009 at 4:42pm by Seamus Holman
Yeah, it's definitely Verdana and it's got to go. If I was their designer, I'd use Georgia for all the body text and headers and leave Helvetica for navigation. It's got the nice old style numbers, a better italic (which they use so wonderfully in the nav) and just feels more authoritative. Their bio pages don't feel special enough. Also, they should be legally forbidden from using type sizes less than 11px. It's a great start though, and if their administrative team is even half as talented as their campaign team it will become a fantastic site.
January 21, 2009 at 10:25am by Thomas Blood
The information architecture supports finding information quickly and easily. The design seems to say: "This administration is transparent. We have nothing to hide." I hope President Obama's administration will be as elegant, interactive and transparent as their web design suggests.
January 22, 2009 at 9:52am by Nigel Gordijk
The sans serif main body font appears as Lucida Sans in my browser(s). Verdana would actually be an improvement that would make the text easier to read because of its bigger x-height. Lucida looks too condensed.
January 22, 2009 at 9:56am by Cliff Kuang
Hi Nigel---Spoken like a man who knows his profession. Thanks for the input!
January 22, 2009 at 11:30am by Richard Sheffield
I love the new site design and IA as well, but I'm hoping that they intend to improve the ability to provide the content in foreign languages. Right now there is a link to Spanish content in the footer, but it takes you out of the normal site navigation to an few bio pages in Spanish. None of the navigation or messaging is in Spanish. I'd like to see the entire site translated and localized to support a number of languages as we reach back out to engage the international community. It might take some major back-end changes to make this happen as the current URL structure does not support language variation of content pages.
January 22, 2009 at 2:34pm by Jeff Foxx
Seamus said "Also, what's up the the artifacts in the header image (around White House and President Barack Obama)?"
What's up is that they made the decision to make that background one giant JPG image. A poor decision IMHO. That white house graphic and the text should absolutely be a PNG. If you are going to absolute position a clear.gif on top of it anyway, why not make it a png and make it crisp, clear text.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/images/eop/bg-main-one.jpg
February 2, 2009 at 7:25pm by Homer Housecat
Hi Cliff - Thought you might be interested to know that someone (a so-called digital ad agency) pretty much plagerized your posting on its blog. Check it out here: http://steponecreative.blogspot.com/2009/01/web-design-you-can-believe-i...
I was looking for commentary on the White House site, and came to your post first. Further along I came across the Steponecreative blog and thought the text was familiar.
Thought you'd be interested in this instance of..er.. flattery.
February 2, 2009 at 7:39pm by Cliff Kuang
@Homer---Ha! Thanks for reading, and thanks for the heads up. Sadly, in these days of web writing, it's pretty much expected that you'll be copy and pasted ad infinitum. Grrr.