CommonWealth is a quarterly journal published by political think-tank Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth (MassINC), mentioned above. The award-winning magazine covers politics, policy, ideas, and civic life, with an emphasis on investigative reporting and in-depth analysis. In our redesign, we focused on promoting their reputation as an unbiased authority on political news and opinion. To this end, we opted for a strong but simple design, and a general emphasis on “just the facts”—large photography, bold headlines, and understated design elements.
As part of the redesign, we migrated over 3,000 web articles from the hard-to-update previous website built on the proprietary Sitecore content management system. We coded the new site using WordPress (the same publishing platform used by Time, CNN, and The New Yorker). A common problem in migrations is cleaning up poorly-formatted HTML. We used a few innovative coding techniques to strip down unnecessary code so that the articles would blend in seamlessly on the new platform.
The new design is fully responsive to tablet and mobile devices with imagery that looks great on high-pixel-density screens (e.g.,Apple Retina Display). Since the launch of the redesign, readership has been growing consistently and breaking records for the publication.
