A List Apart
Issue bug and masthead.
Since 1998, Happy Cog has published A List Apart, “for people who make websites.” Millions read it monthly. Designers, developers, writers, and other user experience professionals trust the magazine to stimulate their creativity, challenge their assumptions, and keep them abreast of emerging best practices. You can learn more about A List Apart elsewhere on our site.
The redesign
In 2005, art director Jason Santa Maria embraced the challenge of redesigning this beloved brand. The site had originally offered a low-fi, no-frills minimalism (A List Apart was one of the founders of the “HTML Minimalist” school). Santa Maria embraced that heritage but added a previously missing elegance of conception and execution.
Drawing on centuries of typographic tradition from the world of print, the redesign invites readers to linger and browse. It is one of the best examples of what can be achieved typographically on the modern web—all with just two common household fonts (Verdana and Georgia) and well-considered whitespace. Eric Meyer rendered every picky detail of the design in CSS. Kevin Cornell’s brilliant illustrations illuminate each article; otherwise, there is almost no ornamentation (just as in the no-frills 1998 original).
We have a system, and it works
A typically quirky Kevin Cornell illustration at A List Apart Magazine.
How do you support a cleanly reimagined online magazine? With an editorial refresh and a spanking new publishing system.
While editor Erin Kissane and creative director Zeldman refocused the magazine's editorial strategy, and while Zeldman completely revised the site’s architecture, Dan Benjamin created a dazzling new publishing framework in Ruby on Rails. It was one of the first major Ruby on Rails applications, and Benjamin conceived and built it in a matter of months, working without assistance—almost as a proof of concept that Ruby on Rails lets small teams do big things fast.
A List Apart has always provided readers with the pleasure of feeling smarter, more advanced, and more in-the-know than their colleagues. It now provides aesthetic pleasure as well. From its architecture to the kerning of its XHTML subheads, A List Apart also serves as a demo on how to do magazines online.
Responsibilities
Editing, writing, information architecture, brand design, graphic design, user interface design, CSS/XHTML template development, production, publishing. Site launched 1998; this redesign (“ALA 4.0”) launched 22 August 2005.