Theme Magazine

Theme magazine is a publication that features a collection of stories that are centered around varying topics for each issue. The target audience is creative people who enjoy stories that are well-written, well-designed, and have a global perspective. The main navigation at the top is clear and consistent, and I think it does a great job of featuring the main components of the magazine. When one of the main items is selected, a left side navigation appears. This goes into more detail, with popular posts and rss feed items for the page as well. I like how the magazine index is organized by country, but the story page is organized by topic. It gives the user multiple ways to view the content but in a subliminal way. The navigation at the top of the page is stays the same throughout, with a simple color change when selected, while the side nav changes with the page.

The architecture of the pages in general is fairly simple, but it seems to have a great depth of content that one would expect to find in a magazine. The type is organized not only by size, but by color and position. Overall it retains an editorial feel, but also seems to fit on the web. The layout is very grid based, but the structure is necessary for such a great amount of content. It stays fairly consistent, with opening headline, byline, and main image followed by body content. The main nav has the most weight on the page along with the featured image. I think I might bring a bit more attention to the headline as well, but for the most part the hierarchy is working well.

I think I gravitated to this site simply because it handles a lot of content well. There isn’t much art or illustration to speak of besides photographs, however. Some sort of iconography or simple vector images would really add another level to what is a really great basic layout. I think that the choice to go simple was great as far as the color scheme, it allows for varying content and diverse full color images without any conflict or vibration.

Overall I think that the site is very functional and simple, with very clean type that makes it easy to use. The most useful areas to me are the popular stories section and the multiple menus for navigation.