Grey and Gone

I'm not going to lie. I can't examine three award-winning journalistic projects and then look at the website for our student paper, the Setonian, and not say it pales in comparison--literally. The primary colors here are shades of grey with a touch of teal. It's boring. It looks like something designed for old people.

I think it would be really easy to brighten up the Setonian pages. Using the school colors, red and gold, would probably work well if done tastefully. The designer would have to be careful to not completely overwhelm the readers with color, because the primary concern should still be readability, but there's no reason why we have to be so dull. Or, we could take things in a totally different direction. For example, note how the New York Times makes a black and blue layout work. The key component, I think, is the blue hyperlinks. The bright color, as opposed to our drab teal, pops out on the screen.

Another thing I took issue with regarding the Setonian Online includes the text, which all seems to be a few centimeters over to the left. It's just odd, and it can probably be fixed by someone who knows CSS. In the same way, there are huge gaps between story headlines and the text itself. The grey boxes at the bottom of the page that any "related links" appear in are drab, too. The header is a splotchy, almost unrecognizable picture of the side of what I assume is one of our buildings that fades into a bar of solid grey. I see nothing here that suggests this website is a newspaper.

But do you know what the worst part of our layout is?

It doesn't look too much different from this.

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