Designing for an online journal has presented some interesting challenges. For one thing, it’s interesting to see what happens when you conceptualize, and then wind up somewhere completely different at the end. I’m not even done yet, and even I don’t know where the final draft will end up. Such is webdesign’s fluidity.

So how about a peek at what I have so far, and where I started?

To the left, you can see the original rough pass after it was decided that the issues would be published as PDFs, I wasn’t entirely sure what to do with the layout. Extremely rough, but I needed something to work with.

I felt there were some good ideas in this layout, particularly the Latest Issue box, which I am proud to say made it more or less intact into the second attempt at the layout. Overall, this was just a very simple layout that ultimately felt a little thrown together and kind of ugly. I just needed to get something down on paper, so to speak. Of course, when putting it together, nothing went right, so I had to improvise and make some heavy changes to my original concept.

So, what did I end up with? Just take a look on the right

I can’t really explain why I ended up with this, but I do feel it is a vast improvement with content and functionality in mind.

Since the journal will be publish through PDFs I felt that some sort of preview element would be important to the success of the journal, which is why I have those boxes for each issue, that includes a small list of some of the papers as well as a download link.

Since new content is always one of the first things people look for, I have the latest issue with some extended information in the top left-hand corner of the page. If you look at the long issue-list and the individual issue boxes, you will see the newest information is always at the top left of the corresponding section. I’m very pleased with the individual issue boxes, and with a little styling, I think they will be a very nice addition to the entire page. They’ll convey a lot of information without a whole lot of clutter.

I am far from finished, of course. I need to talk to the rest of my team about this and gather their feedback and requests, but I think they’ll go along with what I have.

I have some more visual and style stuff to modify as well, but that’s the fun part, really. The core is in place, provided they don’t demand sweeping changes.

Now if only I could squeeze some money out of this type of thing…

If you would like to see the working layout in action, just click here.

I’ve done a lot of work for the journal so far, including editing some of the contributed papers. My hope is that when it comes to designing the issues, they might give me a crack at a few of them, that was I can get some journalism and design work onto my resume.

Anyway, if you have any comments on the layout, by all means, let me know.

Please remember that pages for the episodes will be custom-fit to the content of that episode. Think of the main page as more of a DVD-menu.

Opinions and suggestions are always welcome. Is it a little plain, or is less more in this case?