Mark Boulton Design

Nature is the world’s foremost weekly scientific journal and is the flagship journal for Nature Publishing Group (NPG).

NPG publishes journals and online databases across the life, physical and applied sciences and, most recently, clinical medicine. Content encompasses daily news from award-winning journalists, expert opinion and practical methodology, and more high impact research and reviews than any science publisher. Over 30 journals are published in association with prestigious academic societies.

NPG runs its web service on a number of production tools. They approached Mark Boulton Design to redesign the overall framework, and one of these tools; Pushlive.

Simple solutions to complex problems

Publishing tools, just like any lightweight content management systems, are difficult to design. Luckily for us, Nature had done most of the hard work for us in-house and provided us with detailed wireframe schematics of each unique template in the system. It was our job to interprate those wireframes into an interface that would be easy to use day-in, day-out by Nature’s staff.

Many designers fail to deliver on the design of content management systems for one simple reason; they try to be too creative. We understood that this application, which belongs to an upcoming suite of applications, will be used by people all day, every day. It’s not the place to get creative. The interface had to be easy on the eye, intuitive and a joy to use. We like to think we did that.

From Visual to Templates

Pushlive, which belongs to a suite of applications, had to be designed with a view that the code produced from the templates would be used as a basis for a wider development project. Mark Boulton Design produced documented, valid XHTML templates and a CSS structure that could be scaled to incorporate that development.