TORONTO—Undertaking a redesign on Thestar.com, the online home of The Toronto Star, is no small task, a fact not lost on the firm that won the bid for the job. “This project was one of the most intensive creative explorations we’ve ever gone through,” says Geoff Teehan, a partner at Toronto-based Teehan + Lax. He says they took the Torstar team through dozens of steps exploring the various ways news can be presented online. “We’re dealing with typography, photography — we wanted something that was going to let the news pop off the page.”

































The purpose of the redesign, says Pam Laycock, Torstar Digital COO and Star Media Group interim vice president, digital, is to refresh the site from its last major change three years ago. “We want to be innovative in how we present the news and how users can experience the news,” she says. “That is the most important reason to execute the redesign.”

There have been a few significant changes to the site, says Laycock, where social media played a large role in the decision making process. Users now have the option of getting their news through visual, grid or timeline views. “This is interesting and attractive because over half of our users come back more than once during the day to see what’s new, what’s happening in the world of news,” she says. “The timeline view enables you to see news that has been published since you last viewed the site.”

Describing the look of the new site as clean and simple, Teehan says monitor sizes and viewing ability were major concerns when working on the new site. “Most of our concepts revolved around simplicity, trying to scale back to only the necessary elements,” he says. “Giving ample white space around the stories so that not everything is colliding into each other. As monitor sizes get larger and research tells us scrolling isn’t as much of an issue, we can get away with putting in more white space.”

With large redesigns, Teehan says, it is a tough decision to know when to make the site live but he credits Torstar with taking the leap and allowing users to see the first iteration. “We get into these ruts of design iteration,” he says. “There is nothing like using the real thing; to make the decision to stop tweaking and put it to market. You get some really and truly informed decisions and insight to do another iteration.” Contact: Thestar.com, Teehanlax.com