Research: Website Design (Jake)

Seeing as my roles of this project involves Researcher and Illustrator for the application itself, I decided that I would go through various news websites and see if any of them share any similarities between them, so that we can determine our look for the application.

First off we have BBC News:

This news site is mainly white with a red banner on top with different tabs relating to business, world, entertainment, etc. for the kind of people that would be fascinated about different topics. And as you scroll through the page, the articles are very organized, with the most read articles being listed like a top 10 of some kind.

All the articles on this page have a thumbnail that shows the idea of what the article is all about. So basically, this is a perfect example of how a news website would resemble.

But now, let's take a look at a website like Sky News.

This one is actually mostly grey, but one thing that makes it feel like it has some style is that there are gradients all over the website, in an attempt to not appear so plain, contrasting the BBC News website.

And interestingly, there are more colours than red and white (or grey). The video tab as shown here is actually a blue gradient, a cooler colour to contrast the warmer red on the News logo.

The final website I want to show is the CNN website:

Curiously, although this website uses both white and red colours (white for the background and red on the CNN logo), the banner is actually black, which actually gives it some kind of contrast.

As it turns out, the reason as to why a lot of new sites tend to have such simple colours, such as white and red, and sometimes blue, is because back when newspapers existed, colours were limited, so news websites usually try to emulate this.