The Guardian digital design style guide | Hacker News Reader

The Guardian digital design style guide

design.theguardian.com

Nice style guide, better than most.

However, I may never understand why grid systems get the amount of reverence that they do. Although there's a certain necessity in having consistency, I can't help but view grid systems has a sort of pseudoscience. Page 2/7 in this style guide shows examples of many page elements that aren't really consistent with their grid. I've also seen plenty of websites with great designs that have different sized margins, or they lack dead space, or their gutters are different sizes, and they look fine. Grids make more sense for print because you have a single size of viewport, vertically and horizontally, therefore you need to have a system for fitting what you can on a single page. On the web, there's infinite vertical space, and most news websites don't take "above the fold" that seriously anymore. Besides, the web developer will inevitably be asked to do some one off special design at some point that violates the grid system. It might as well not exist, but be relegated to a light guideline.

Grid Systems by Josef Müller-Brockmann (https://amzn.to/3Mzt5AB) is my favorite design book, but I just use an 8x8 grid since it became the standard on iOS.

A large part of this guide is totally unimportant to me. I don't think I would detect a change in some of these policies. It's probably already changed in the past years, and I've never seen it while reading the Guardian daily.

The problem with this focus on design consistency and cosmetic features is that they loose the global view. I pay for the Guardian, and I'm glad to pay for their content, yet I still have to use uBlock to hide some annoying blocks. I've also painfully configured uBlock to disable carrousels (how am I supposed to read anything with images sliding next to it?). And I still prefer their website with JS turned off, though it breaks a few things.

I'd prefer an ugly and inconsistent frontpage, even a plain table of titles, if there was a way to, for instance, display the most important news of the last X=5 days in the category Y=International, etc.

> It's probably already changed in the past years

The Guardian's website has changed very little since 2015 or so[0]. The logo, fonts, and colour palette have evolved in 2018, but the structure, grid, or even the category colours (orange for opinion, blue for sport, etc.) have not changed at all.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20150131232757/http://www.thegua...

I'm glad that some form of reader mode is now available in all major browsers to turn off weird visual decoration and focus on the content.

This is news to me. After seeing your comment I went through every menu on chrome and can't find it. Is this actually a thing. Is it just really well hidden or am I just a dummy?

I think it must still be in some level of development/testing for Chrome because it's is very hidden. I just tried these instructions on Chrome desktop version and was able to enable it: https://www.computerworld.com/article/3697312/google-chrome-...

I don't use chrome. In Firefox reader mode is an icon in the address bar you can just press. Why would chrome hide it? Unless I'm missing something and you're both talking about something completely different.

It's that same type of feature, but it seems like Chrome is timid about rolling it out fully (possibly because it hides ads).

I'd much rather read the daily news as a Bear-style blog, with the addition of categories.

https://herman.bearblog.dev/blog/

One url for the whole day. Oh how I hate the scroll.

I've never seen a design guide quite like this before, because this guide essentially tells me how to construct a content-oriented web site from parts.

Since I'm a run-of-the-mill data-oriented app developer I'm familiar with design languages like Material, Ant Design, Microsoft Fluent, etc. But those design languages don't tell me how to structure a run-of-the-mill admin panel app from parts.

Does anyone know of a guide for a data-oriented application similar to this?

I will never pay for anything from The Guardian because of their unashamed parrotting of British establishment propaganda during the lead up to the Scottish independence referendum. There was no effort whatsoever to be impartial or even bother representing the truth.

Their Scottish reporting continues in the same vein to this day.

Similar story with their coverage of Clinton/Sanders during the US primaries. Also the coverage of Corbyn (effectively leading the charge with some very tenuous but oft-repeated accusations of antisemitism). The bias shown on these two issues in particular have been detrimental to the credibility of the Guardian in my opinion.

It seems the Guardian's editorial position has become decidedly centrist/establishment since I first started reading the Guardian Weekly many many years ago. They have long since stopped being the voice of the left. That is unless you subscribe to a left/right schism defined along the lines of identity politics - which helps explain the Guardian's rejection of Sanders in favour of Clinton.

Despite all of that, I do still find it a good source of news and visit the site most days. Aside from the content, the site is very good in my opinion. I'll be taking a closer look at the design style guide for sure.

On the Corbyn thing, it was also revealed in the Labour Leaks that the Guardian were colluding with "Blue Labour" and the party's right wing to get those stories published, along with every single disgusting hit piece on Diane Abbott.

in 1996 several online version of famous news papers were posting that exact same guide. it's not innovative or good. it's just what you will get if you put print designers to churn web design to webmasters (damn in old).

also the reason designers were posting this was because they were all looking for jobs.

Dunning-Kruger effect in full force there my good person.

After reading the headline, for an instant I thought The Guardian was designing chips.

It's a good presentation of design style. Personally I'm not a huge fan of their serif font's sharp edges, but the absence of a paywall is good enough to overlook that. (If anyone says "You should be willing to pay for good journalism" - I wouldn't mind paying if my student budget allowed it.)

It’s a strong paper in many ways. I particularly like the sports coverage, it helped make me a Premier League fan.

iPad safari user: for some reason the page doesn't scroll in portrait. When i rotate the device into landscape everything is fine. Odd.

The Guardian, especially for their podcasts, is the only news website I am paying and have ever payed for. And I pay more willingly than any other newspaper would get from me for their paywall stuff. It‘s that valuable for me to support this approach.

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