Monsters and Critics
Monsters and Critics began life as an entertainment news site many years ago. It grew, as websites do, into a fully fledged news website pulling in content from many news agencies across the world. The original site design was bursting at the seams to try and accommodate the increasingly varied content. Mark Boulton Design was assigned to redesign the website from the ground up; from information architecture to branding. The works.
Beginning with the branding
Monsters and Critics, or ‘M & C’, as it has become known, already had a logo and they wanted to stick with it. Fair enough. Successful logo redesigns are not always different logos. In fact, we’d argue that most are realigned versions of the existing - and well known - marks.
The new branding for Monsters and Critics had to retain elements of the existing brand whilst giving it a fresher look
We redrew the logo taking on board the previous design but bringing it up to date and making it more adaptable to multiple media types by redrawing it to work in black and white.
Great news sites have great Mastheads
The Masthead on a news website has a tough job. Even on the most basic sites, it should do two things; tell the user where they are, and communicate the branding and ‘sense of place’ to the user. Early on in the design process we established that masthead should only carry that information. Its strength would be hightened by its simplicity. Simple colour coded for each section helps give variety to the page types and provides important feedback to regular visitors (who need to know they are in the right place).
A different masthead and colourway was designed for each section
From Visual to Templates
Information dense websites, such as news websites, need careful consideration to ensure the data is presented in a legible way. Monsters and Critics has varied content - from videos and galleries and lists and articles of text - pulled from numerous news sources across the globe. One of our first tasks was to establish the form in which that data is delivered and how we were going to integrate it into the new site. Working to a check-list of unique templates (which we’d established during the Information Architecture phase), we drew up a solid grid structure on which to design the templates.
Not only did we develop the design and branding, but we built the front end XHTML templates and CSS too. Conforming to the very best in Web Standards, the CSS system is flexible enough to add other sections (with colour-coded mastheads) and specific branded sections for advertisers all with just a few lines of code.
The finished design used a flexible grid system to accomodate a number of advertising options, in addition to a fresh colourway and carefully considered typography
Mark Boulton Design delivered Monsters and Critics on time and on budget to a delighted client. Some would argue that a redesign on a purely visual level does not give a good return on investment, well, if Monsters and Critics is anything to by, they couldn’t be further than the truth. Monsters and Critics continues to grow rapidly as a direct result of the redesign.