Dezeen has updated its website for the first time in 10 years. Dezeen's co-CEOs Benedict Hobson and Wai Shin Li explain the changes.
You might have noticed that things look a little different around here. Yes, after many years, we have redesigned our website!
It has been 10 years, in fact – the last major revamp of Dezeen was in 2016. And as with our previous redesign, evolution, not revolution, has been the aim.
Dezeen was launched by Marcus Fairs from his spare room as a basic WordPress blog in 2006. When it started to take off, he brought designer and typographer Micha Weidmann on board to design a logo and layout for it, and this has been the foundation upon which Dezeen has been built ever since.
We really like it, and millions of readers around the world seem to like it too.
So our ambition for this redesign was to bring the site up to date while staying true to the core identity that has helped Dezeen become what it is today.
Underneath the bonnet, there's been a complete overhaul
We have worked with creative technology studio Made by On to refresh the look and feel of the site and improve the user interface to make it more useful and enjoyable to use.
Underneath the bonnet, there's been a complete overhaul.
Our previous site was built on ageing technology that had grown clunky over time. Things broke too often and, as regular readers will know, fixing them was a slow and often painful process.
So we tasked Made by On with rebuilding both the front- and back-ends of the site from the ground up to make Dezeen much more stable and responsive.
Reducing the carbon impact of the website was also a key priority, so Made by On focused on performance and efficiency throughout the build, doing a lot of work on image optimisation in particular.
We also used the opportunity of the rebuild to move our hosting to The Positive Internet Company, whose server infrastructure runs on 100-per-cent-renewable energy, and moved our search and recommendation engines, which were previously run by external services, onto our own infrastructure.
Dezeen has expanded far beyond a daily news publishing platform
The new website is faster, richer and, we hope, more enjoyable to use. It also better reflects what Dezeen is today.
Over the past two decades, Dezeen has expanded far beyond a daily news publishing platform to become a suite of services for the global architecture and design community: Dezeen Awards, Dezeen Events Guide and Dezeen Showroom, to name a few.
These were added in a fairly ad hoc way over time, so the overall experience could feel fragmented.
To bring everything together, we returned to Micha Weidmann, who refreshed our brand guidelines, introducing updated colour schemes and logos across all our sub-brands to create a coherent family.
Made By On then used these guidelines to create a cohesive web experience, carefully engineered to meet the latest web accessibility standards, ensuring Dezeen can be enjoyed comfortably by all our readers.
Every service across dezeen.com has undergone a major redesign to ensure it offers real value to our readers. Our jobs website dezeenjobs.com will be updated in the coming weeks.
Navigating the site should now be easier thanks to a fresh menu, search and filtering system
So, what has changed? (And what has not?)
Visually, we have retained the classic typographic treatments that go back to Micha's first design nearly 20 years ago. However, we have introduced new styling formats to bring greater hierarchy and visual interest to the pages, as well as splashes of colour to better identify content relating to our different services.
We love how eclectic Dezeen is – every story starts at the top and works its way down the homepage, regardless of subject matter – and this will continue. At the same time, our content offering has expanded significantly over the years, and it was too easy for some of our best content to get lost.
So the core, reverse-chronological feed of news stories remains, as do our signature square images. However, we have introduced varied image sizes alongside new horizontal scrolling sections to break up the vertical feed and spotlight specific content types.
Navigating the site should now be much easier thanks to a fresh menu, search and filtering system, which is unified across all of our services. We have also decluttered the right sidebar and added parallax scrolling to create what we hope readers will find to be an intuitive, easily navigable and enjoyable experience.
Video and audio have also been improved: we can now integrate vertical video much more seamlessly, and our podcast Dezeen Weekly, which we launched earlier this year, has been given greater prominence.
We have also built significantly more flexible and visual article layouts.
We will continue publishing amazing buildings, interiors and products from around the world, and we can now include larger images, as well as photo galleries and slideshows, in our articles and across our services to ensure these projects really shine.
In an era increasingly dominated by AI, we believe human-created journalism is more important than ever
Since starting as a basic blog, our editorial range has expanded into long-form features, interviews and opinion pieces, and the new layouts will create a far richer environment for these stories too.
In an era increasingly dominated by AI-generated content and algorithmic feeds, we believe human-created journalism, curation and critical opinion are more important than ever.
While we are using smarter technology to power our new search, filtering and content-recommendation systems, the stories you read on Dezeen continue to be sourced, written and edited by our team. This takes a lot of time and effort, and with this redesign we want to ensure this content has the high-quality platform it deserves.
We know readers generally do not love advertisements, but Dezeen would not exist without them (and if you use an ad blocker, we'd like to use this as an opportunity to kindly ask you to turn it off for Dezeen so we can continue bringing you our content for free).
We have updated our ad formats to deliver better performance for our partners while respecting our readers' experience. We have also introduced clearer and more consistent badging of partnership content.
Our aim has been to create an ad experience not dissimilar to a high-end glossy magazine: integrated thoughtfully with appropriate partners so that it enhances the page rather than detracts from it.
The aim has been to retain the spirit of Dezeen
Overall, the ambition has been to create a richer and more versatile site that retains the spirit of the Dezeen that you know and love.
Marcus's vision when he started Dezeen almost 20 years ago was to set the global architecture and design agenda, and Dezeen has since grown to become one of the most influential architecture and design media brands in the world.
The new website will enable us to continue that mission for the years ahead. We hope you enjoy exploring it.
Benedict Hobson and Wai Shin Li are co-CEOs of Dezeen.
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