Homepage redesign for Rest of World
Rest of World | 2024 | Design
A publication’s homepage is essential for many reasons: conveying its identity and mission, gaining reader trust, showing the breadth of work it has to offer and becoming a destination fo readers to return to. I had the opportunity to update Rest of World’s homepage to better execute these objectives after a few years of publishing. The masthead received a significant revamp with the logo now placed center and made bigger. It is one of the most distinctive elements of our brand identity, and I wanted to spotlight it front and center with its rotating system of diacritics. The new layout also created more room for links to pages like the newsletter index. Google Analytics showed that there was a 165% increase in the average number of clicks per day on the masthead with these changes.
Another update was creating more distinguishable areas on the homepage like the Latest Stories and Donation modules. I designed the latest stories module to act more like a bulleted feed with only headlines and metadata to improve scannability and prevent any dense walls of text. The donation module was an important addition to signal that Rest of World is a non-profit publication.
The homepage’s color palette also underwent a drastic change. It used to rotate through several different color palettes in our old system, but we learned from user interviews that many readers found this to be confusing. In its place, I chose a clean white background where all of our visuals could shine and different colors from our updated palette like cobalt, navy or pink could play nice together.