15/04/08

New Work: www.granta.com

We’ve just launched the first phase of the new website for literary quarterly, Granta Magazine.

Granta is “the magazine of new writing”, and recently celebrated its 100th issue. The magazine dates back to 1889, and our new site coincides with the publication of Granta 101, the first issue edited by Jason Cowley, who was appointed by the new owner, Sigrid Rausing.

The magazine and masthead have been redesigned by Graphic Thought Facility and Carolyn Roberts (art director of The Observer); their elegant reworking of the magazine was our only design brief.

We’re delighted with the site; it demonstrates all that we hold dear when it comes to websites: good code; clear design, typographic grids (on a 20px baseline, for those who care about such things – and with the images automatically being sized to fit into this grid); good SEO, and fast as hell. It’s also built on Open Source content management system, Node. And, ummm, it’s red, black and white.

But this is just the beginning. Phase one is really just a placeholder to coincide with Issue 101; the next release is phase two, which includes some much bigger and more ambitious stuff. We’re digitising the entire 100-issue archive of the magazine, dating back some 20 years and including some incredible material from literature’s recent past; we’re adding debate, discussion and interactivity in a way that you just can’t do with a literary quarterly; we’re opening up the publication cycle to include new material, new authors and new genres that don’t fit into the print edition – but which make total sense on the web. There’s video, and some beautiful photo essays. And we’re also implementing ecommerce into the site for subscriptions and back issues.

This project has been a year in the making – during which time we’ve had to get our hands dirty with some new parts of the web: online subscription models; online advertising (solved by going with the wonderful – open source – package Open X); pagination – some Granta articles are very, very, very long (and this is one of the shorter ones). And whilst we want to keep some powder dry for phase two, looking at the logic of encouraging tagging and and debate whilst eliminating spam and trolls.

We’ll put this up in the portfolio soon, and will also post when phase two is released, but we’d love to hear any comments as to what you think of it…

Posted by Peter Collingridge in Apt Studio work, Publishing.

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