Dan Hill on Monocle

Dan Hill has written a fantastic dissection of the design and implementation of Monocle's website.
Monocle was launched about a year ago, and Dan joined from BBC Music and Radio Interactive to help create its web presence, building on the design of the magazine but also asking questions of what a website should be. What's interesting about this is that instead of going the Web 2.0 route, they chose a much more bespoke approach, putting together a highly designed site with carefully controlled content and layout which flies in the face of current thinking in this age of Social Networking and actively-sought contribution and community. The net result is a thriving hub of guaranteed quality and considered opinion, and as importantly, a successful business.
Get yourself a cup of coffee before reading it, because it's a long piece, but the fact that Dan has laid out Monocle's thought-processes and working practices so succinctly and transparently means this is required reading for anyone putting together a sizeable company website.

Monocle design notes
Monocle was conceived as a multi-platform brand from the start. Tyler Brûlé's work since Wallpaper* included a design and branding agency, Winkreative, and editorial production capacity, Winkontent. The latter had produced TV programmes (BBC4's The Desk and Counter Culture, for instance) and Tyler himself had started as a broadcast journalist (with the BBC and others). So an understanding of what makes good audio-video content was certainly present in the building to begin with, and my experience from the BBC reinforced that. It was definitely part of the plan for Monocle. We wanted to make Monocle a journalism brand that you had a weekly relationship with via the internet, as well as the monthly relationship via the magazine. Ultimately, this should be daily, if aspirations come to fruition. This weekly relationship would be through a form of broadcast media, using the internet’s ability for distributing video - something enabled only in the last couple of years, effectively - and thus conveying the sense of a Monocle broadcast news element, complementing the ‘book’.

The challenge was to create a working environment that would produce it, and then an online environment that could distribute it.

Via Pete Ashton

Comments

[mike miller]

Hy Dan

I'd love to hear from you. KEEP SWINGING OLD BOY!!

MIKE