Slate vs. The World

I went surfing around the Slate website to see how different the site would be from that of popular print magazine websites. I expected that there would be a pretty noticeable difference in the structure and design of the website. What I found was it was essentially the same website as tons of other news websites. Upon arriving at the Slate home page, I immediately thought of the GQ homepage.

Both websites seem to be a cluttered mess that is differentiated not by its design, but by the quality of its content and columnists. While magazine's like People, GQ, and Car and Driver can afford to keep a cluttered homepage with an overload of information, Slate does not have this luxury because the website is the only source that people can go to in order to get information from Slate. This causes a conundrum because people will often want to play it safe as to not lose visitors to the site, but I personally would suggest making the website feel more like a magazine, since that is what it is supposed to be.

I think designers should take risks - particularly those that are designing for situations as unique as digital-only magazines. I would personally offer an option on a Slate splash page in which users get a "normal HTML-like, cluttered page or they can choose a more magazine-like style so that laptop users or even mobile web users have the option to flip through the website like a magazine. Psychologically, this could give readers a magazine feel and make them believe that they are getting an amazing deal because they are getting quality magazine-like information for free. Slate has an opportunity to be better than the rest of the magazine world. I think they're missing out.