Vertical Columns, Horizontal Content

About halfway through the newest post by Andy Rutledge is a section called “How Deep is My Silo?” The premise is ridiculously simple: newspaper and magazine layouts in the print world do not translate necessarily into good layouts on the web.

“When newspapers and other print publications took their products to the Web, they were armed with what they thought was relevant design expertise. But this theretofore expertise turned to hubris when they failed to accurately recognize the constraints of this new medium. Their design and layout experience caused them to hold precious their deep columnar silo approach to sectional information presentation.”

As you can see with Mimbo’s layout, there was some attempt to ape the older conventions of newspaper and magazine columns. But as I’m seeing now, just as I saw before in MSNBC’s redesign, it’s not ideal to expect the human eye to scan a vertically-oriented series of columns when our impulses are to read and interpret information from left-to-right.

The study of eye-tracking on large websites is a real science — Andy managed to break it down into simple anecdotes for designers who’ve used vertical layouts and three-column designs over the years without realizing the drawbacks.

“The best method is to acknowledge the horizontal nature of the medium and lay out your departments and contexts in a horizontal manner…With this method scrolling can become basically a one-time affair and there is no contextual dissipation of information.”

I’ll be taking some of this into account when designing the new Mimbo Pro.

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