Mayak — Redesign of online magazine

Mayak (Translation from Ukrainian — Lighthouse) is Ukrainian online media about culture and society, which grew out of Odessa 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, culture, science, sexuality and urbanism.

Magazine celebrates the 6-th 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 really 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. And we kept implementing our ideas of the new visual forms when developing the design of the website.

No one can be surprised by the high traffic rate from mobile device users in 2020. The Mayak is not an exception, so we paid a lot of attention to developing the smartphones and tablets screen’s interfaces.

The Special Project are one of the key ways to monetize the magazine. These projects are thoughtful, highly detailed and prepared with a big amount of objectives, compared to typical articles. We thought over 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. And for a snack, we worked out the schedule and chronology’s design, and also 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 kind of project “chip” is the automatic display of 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. For example, the 404 error page, the special project rates page, also we updated the team’s page design. We inherited from the old version only illustrations of the Mayak editorial staff.

We did the website fully mobile responsive for mobiles, tablets and wide devises, 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 complete absence of edits and 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 (URL) of the articles. We updated the old styles of content design so that the Mayak editorial staff would not have to rework all the articles for the new design, since very often during redesigns this becomes a tangible problem. But thanks to the team experience and a number of non-standard solutions in the process of work, this work was avoided and the client’s team saved months of life :).