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Blastr

In summer 2015 I gave the sci-fi and fantasy entertainment news blog a ground-up redesign. Modular and responsive, design focused on improving navigation and search, facilitating social interaction, and integrating both dynamically generated and editorially controlled blocks of content in a variety of layout styles to effectively feature high priority editorials and breaking news.

 
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01 | Home

Our focus with this layout was on creating a flexible, modular system that allowed editors to give individual articles varying weight. Aside from the top story and dynamically generated trending block, the layout would adjust to best suit the content at that moment, and blocks could be added to bubble up articles on a relevant topic, event or hashtag, resulting in a constantly evolving curated experience with an editorial front page feel. Users could always navigate chronologically, here and throughout the site, via the right column, or jump to a topic via article tag.

 
 
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02 | Articles

The design here again needed to prioritize flexibility, providing an array of tools to enrich in-depth features but a clean default layout for quicker-hit breaking news. It was also designed to maximize recirculation, with the right column full chronological feed, now integrating popular article blocks, remaining persistent across the site and a Related block with most relevant articles by topic immediately following the reading experience.

 
 
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03 | Navigation

Top-level categories and trending topics were immediately accessible via the persistent header, with pulldowns enabling easy navigation to the latest and most relevant articles within each. The header also gave users quick access to the main menu and a robust search function to find what they were looking for directly.

 
 
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Credits

Role
Sr. Designer