‘Haters to the Side’ Indeed

[Whoops: Fixed the missing main URL link. Sorry about that.]

Speaking of Josh Topolsky-helmed publications and controversial designs, it hasn’t taken long for this 2015 piece at Wired to age poorly (headline: “Haters to the Side: Bloomberg’s Loud Redesign Heralds the Future of Web News”):

Not everyone loves the new Bloomberg Business site. On Twitter, pundits have pilloried it, saying it looks like “Instagram filters on acid,” and, more simply, “I don’t like it.” Marc Andreessen knocked it, and Venturebeat says it “pulls you in as much as it spits in your eye.”

Josh Topolsky, editor of Bloomberg Digital and the man who spearheaded this new look and strategy, is undeterred. He has a bigger vision for what the future of news design can be. “If you look at most news sites you see a basic formatting, that’s really based on traditional newspaper design,” he says. Or, readers get their news from feeds like Twitter and Facebook, where it’s “presented in rapid fire in headline after headline.”

Since leaving The Verge this past July to join Bloomberg, Topolsky and design agency Code and Theory have been working on a kaleidoscopic, modular web design for the news organization that corrals all of Bloomberg’s media properties — Bloomberg News, Bloomberg Businessweek, Bloomberg TV, and Bloomberg Graphics — under one roof, and relies neither on a gridded layout nor a feed. “What drives me insane in modern web design is grids,” Topolsky says. “What’s important is a page that moves.”

Virtually nothing from that redesign remains at Bloomberg, which now sports very readable article pages and a grid-based homepage.

★ Tuesday, 4 September 2018