The New York Times Magazine, 2013 Innovations Issue, Online Edition

The New York Times Magazine did something new with the online edition of their 2013 Innovations Issue, building a dedicated section of their site for the 48 short essays, with color schemes and type to match the print edition designed by Arem Duplessis.

The typefaces are LL Circular, a new release from Lineto which even gets a mention up front, A2 Beckett for headlines, Georgia for text, and just a dash of the NYT’s custom bold condensed Stymie on the front page. The format isn’t complex, but it feels like a pretty special edition of the magazine due to the unique packaging, navigation, colors, and especially the type. The design also responds quite well to narrow window sizes

I have only two complaints. Some of the color backgrounds are a little too strong for reading, especially when they also include a halftone image like the “Sleep-Away Camp” article below. To counteract this, the designers added a tiny white drop shadow to the text (an increasingly popular practice on the web), but I think this does more harm than good — though the effect is sharper and more distracting in some of these screenshots (shown at reduced size) than as I experienced it in the browser.

The other beef is minor: the right margin is slightly cropped for me (see the comments link at top of all pages), probably because they only tested on a Mac which had the default hidden OS X scrollbars that only appear when scrolling. Oops.