I was tasked with building an online home for Mix Magazine, an Oregonian publication, but had to keep it within wireframe structure of OregonLive.com. The main design challenge was to make a section for a magazine that sits within a news website — to reflect the more polished, premium nature of the content versus the immediacy of the rest of the news on OregonLive. Mix, however, was not the only brand to be extended online, this site became the template for other magazines, including Homes + Gardens Northwest and Ultimate Northwest, collectively referred to as the Oregonian’s Niche Publications. The structure of the magazine templates stayed the same, but the styles (colors fonts, etc) were changed to match each publication’s branding.
There were many technical challenges within the project. Only OregonLive’s current resources could be used to deploy the site but the content authors still needed the ability to add custom styles and custom content. This involved building a modified workflow within the CMS they could easily follow. I made bookmarklets to help alleviate repetitive or code-heavy tasks and built a custom slideshow template, an opportunity to display photos that didn’t make it into the print magazine. To make for easy deployment of the slideshow, I built an online form that generates the needed embed code.
