Mayak — Redesign of the online magazine
Mayak (Translation from Ukrainian—Lighthouse) is Ukrainian online media about culture and society that grew out of the Odesa regional magazine. Its team writes about how the urban environment impacts a person and shapes his consciousness, and a person, for its part, changes the urban environment. Readers enjoy “Mayak” for its hot social topics about human rights, social and cultural minorities, ecology, science, sexuality, and urbanism.
The magazine celebrates its 6th anniversary this year, and the time has come for a complete reboot — to start geographic expansion and design renewal. We have already mentioned our work on updating the logo of “Mayak.” We were very excited about it, and it was hard to stop us. The “Mayak” magazine logo and corporate identity have become brighter, more emotional, alive, and dynamic. We also kept implementing our ideas for the new visual forms when developing the website design.
The high traffic rate from mobile device users in 2020 should not surprise anyone. The Mayak is no exception, so we have focused on developing smartphone and tablet screen interfaces.
The Special Project is one of the key ways to monetize the magazine. Compared to typical articles, these projects are thoughtful, highly detailed, and prepared with many objectives. We considered the design for different interface elements and worked out each component of a single design system.
As a result, specifically for the “special project” section, we thought out blocks of authors, quotes, tables and lists, photo and video galleries, single photos, subheadings, icons and emojis, insertion of goods and their descriptions, a block of articles, and recommended articles relevant for reading. For a snack, we worked out the schedule and chronology’s design. Also, we came up with a running line — a relatively light and unobtrusive element of brutal design for an additional emphasis on an important thought of the magazine’s special project.
A project “chip” automatically displays up-to-date photos from the Mayak Instagram profile in the footer. Photos animate on hover and update as new posts are released.
We paid special attention to the auxiliary project pages, such as the 404 error page and the special project rates page. We also updated the team’s page design. From the old version, we inherited only illustrations of the Mayak editorial staff.
We made the website fully mobile responsive for mobiles, tablets, and wide devices, so we thought over the general logic, navigation, prototypes, and UX design, creating a UI design based on prototypes, old site content, and updated corporate identity.
Instead of an afterword, we made the project with great pleasure and almost no edits or alterations. Thanks to the thesis “You are specialists, so we trust you,” our desire to do cool and not let the client down was expressed more than usual. Working with the old database and site management system (WordPress) became a separate challenge.
We have saved all the links (URLs) to the articles. We updated the old content design styles so that the Mayak editorial staff would not have to rework all the articles for the new design since this often becomes a tangible problem during redesigns. But thanks to the team’s experience and a number of non-standard solutions in the work process, this work was avoided, and the client’s team saved months of life :).
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