Announcing the Publishing 2.0 Redesign

It’s not everyday that you get to redesign one of your favorites sites, so I’m very happy to announce that Bokardo Design’s first release is the redesign of Publishing 2.0. I’ve long been a reader of Scott Karp’s blog about the massive changes in publishing, advertising, and social media. It’s one of the blogs that kind of sits at the fringe of what I do, not directly about design but surely about the topics that are important to designers of new media. Scott’s handle on the big picture of forces in and around publishing have been incredibly insightful for me over the past year as newspapers have come under immense pressure from blogs and other disruptive media.

(We actually released it live last week, but I was away giving a talk on Social Design at UXWeek and couldn’t squeeze in the time to write it up until now)

Publishing2 was a great project for Bokardo Design because it dealt with a load of social features (being a blog and all). This was both a blessing and a curse, as getting the social features into the site was fun but also difficult because of dealing with so many WordPress plugins working at once. We tried hard to get lots of useful features without cluttering up the interface. We consciously fought feature creep and tried to keep the site as personally valuable as possible. One way we did this was to use a plugin that allows folks to follow the comment stream of a blog post whether or not they actually comment on it themselves. Scott’s audience tends to comment in-depth, and they often provide serious insight in the comments. (I hope to add this feature to Bokardo in the near future)

Another interesting part of the redesign was choosing a typeface for the masthead of the site. We couldn’t find a typeface that we were happy with at first, but then we started thinking about what sort of typeface would represent a site like Publishing 2.0. Was there a typeface that was thematically appropriate? I think there is, and I wrote about it on a special page called About the Design, kind of like an extended colophon where we discuss some of the things we did.

This design writeup was a new genre of information, used to explain a little bit about the thought processes behind the design and sharing that with others. I would love to see this sort of thing on other sites! Since Scott played such a big part in the design it seemed appropriate to talk about how we worked together to come up with the end result. This is the ideal situation for me: to work with a client who has a clear vision and a passion for what they do. It really makes the project that much more enjoyable.

Also, I must also mention Scott’s new venture, Publish2 (here’s the blog). I really can’t tell you how brilliant I think this idea is – a social bookmarking and research platform for guess who?…journalists! It took me a while to consider the implications of this…actually still mulling it over. What happens when the research and discussions of journalists are public? There is already speculation of these implications surrounding the new Google News feature…and that’s exactly what Scott is going to find out with Publish2. I’m really excited to see where it goes…and to get insight into things like what blogs and resources journalists find valuable.

So, there are lots of details to the Publishing2 design that I would love to share with you. If you have any questions/comments/etc, feel free to drop me a line.