Will The New York Times Redesign Kill ‘The Fold’

Co.Design has a great article on the redesign of The New York Times website. It seems like it was yesterday when Khoi Vinh led the design team that redesigned the NYT in 1996.

I love the direction that the new website is taking because it takes what has become a noisy site, dense with information and distils it down to a simplistic user interface. As a web designer I love that the new design team has done away with pagination and embraced the infinitely scrolling page made popular by Pinterest.

This is huge step in the right direction for web design that often clings to print design elements such as “the fold”. Printed newspapers have a fold and to be above the fold indicates important content. In web design there is no fold but many web designers, creative directors and clients mistakenly think there is. They tend to treat web pages as printed pages even though the web has been around for over a decade. This drives me crazy!

Pinterest, Facebook and now the NYT embrace infinite scrolling which will help to dispel the myth of “the fold” and make my job easier. This makes me happy.

Posted in Web Design at 8:34 PM