FT re-design

Thursday's Technology Guardian included a critical review by Andrew Brown of the re-design of the Financial Times' home page. Among his complaints, that the increase in type size and additional space in the text made the site as effective as a mobile phone display. Brown's view, in short, is that the site is used by clever people with 20/20 vision and no time to scroll; to quote "Financial Times readers are smarter than the readers of almost every other newspaper - that's certainly what its marketing department would say - and they are used to making decisions under pressure."

It's not prettily put, but it does raise an interesting issue about making a site (or, indeed, any other interaction) attractive to occasional or first time users whilst supporting the habits of long-standing, frequent users.

Martin Belam is more sympathetic to the new design but is critical of one of its fundamentals: the use of FT pink at a background to the text, bringing the web site into line with the newspaper. I'm with him on this; brand consistency is one thing, but the on-screen pink's a bit glary for sustained reading.