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| Refinery29 email newsletter |
I recently came across a website that follows a newsletter format that has the same feel in their email newsletters and social medias pages. Refinery29 is a website dedicated to current topics, fashion and other trending news. It's geared towards women that want to know a little bit about everything.
I was intrigued by the email they sent me that looked fresh and categorized their main stories into topics such as: tech, news, fashion, beauty, etc.
Once you're at their site the layout is really simple. Rather than have a lot of links or things to hunt through, there are story cards with a photo and caption. I think most fashion blogs and news websites tend to use the same format. A couple main stories larger than the others with a short piece of the story, requiring you to click to read more. Then there's the fashion blogs that just have a running archive on the side while the user scrolls down the page to see story after story. If you're lucky there are sometimes keyword searches so you can find your story faster.
Well with Refinery29 they made it much easier. And when you hover over a photo the social media icons pop up so that you can share the story on a few different sites. This is a really nice feature since most sites simply have stagnant icons listed somewhere on the page so that you can share the page.
I can't tell what software they used - definitely some sort of HTML editor. Then there's probably some sort of photo editing involved, maybe PhotoShop and Illustrator? I also assume there's some fancy javascript involved as there are "up next" story banners that appear after you've been on a story for "x" seconds before it scrolls in. They also make use of a repeating header/footer section. And I looked into the webpage code and it looks like they set up a lot of different CSS classes to make sure their story boxes are exactly the same and that each story page also has a similar feel.
I don't have a lot of time to visit their site but it is a nice to scroll through.
