AllThingsD
Tech News with Vim and Vigor
Founded by The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, AllThingsD began as an online extension of the influential and ever sold-out D: All Things Digital conference. We’ve had the terrific opportunity and pleasure to work with the AllThingsD team as the site has grown and evolved into a rigorous and vocal source of breaking news and pointed observations about business, technology, and emerging media.
Adrift in Voices
We designed the initial site in 2007, followed by a home page refresh the year after. Our goal was to create an online home for the quest for insight—always principled and often irreverent—that marked the conference. A variety of voices from the tech and media worlds contributed to the exchange of ideas, now accessible to anyone.
As AllThingsD’s popularity grew, the site expanded to include more coverage, more conferences, and a number of additional well-known writers with distinctive points of view. Multiple branded columns created the potential for confusion while the additional content was bursting through the existing grid.
Corresponding Parts of a Whole
For this redesign, we built on the rapport and collaborative process from our earlier projects. Together with the AllThingsD web team we worked to refine site and content expectations. We wanted to underscore AllThingsD’s dedication to reporting and fostering conversation, while creating a more pleasant reading experience.
Space was key. We designed a structure that would better accommodate the site’s main draws—journalist personalities, the wide range of topics—and account for the expanding slate of conferences and their archives. We narrowed the header, widened the layout, and introduced ways to navigate content by topical category or writer. The new design also featured reduced and consolidated branding; we retired the many column titles, including BoomTown, to encourage a sense of cohesion. Lastly, we opted for an official name change that recognized fans’ long-time familiarity with the brand, from All Things Digital to AllThingsD.
The result is an extensible, compelling site that rewards readers with the outstanding work and incisive opinions that characterize AllThingsD.