Making The Right Pitch

Seattle Met is a monthly news, culture, and lifestyle magazine that illuminates a thriving city for newcomers and longtime residents alike, chronicling the city’s past and present with gravitas and irreverence, and tracing its connection to the nation and the world. They looked to us to guide their transition into the digital world. We started out by reworking their sales & media kit, favoring bold design, eye-catching photography, and a witty editorial voice. After the sales & media redesign, Seattle Met ad revenue sales increased by 10%. We were off to a great start.

A New Way To Deliver The News

Being the city’s go-to guide for news, culture and lifestyle for almost a decade, moving a print publication to web carried huge responsibilities. We would not only be designing the front-end, but an elaborate rail-based CMS to manage content and supporting mobile app geared towards Seattle restaurants.

Laying Out A Blueprint

We started by organizing the massive amount of content that Seattle Met wanted to feature. Information Architecture for a large scale new site is no joke, so wireframes helped to ensure that the content was easily navigable – whether you’re looking for a new hiking trail or the hippest boutique shops.

Giving Context To The Content

A visually compelling hierarchy was created using a clean grid structure of content boxes and regions. Typography, color palette and subtle ui elements further assist readability, while establishing a consistent user experience. After the redesign was launched, time spent on the site shot up a whopping 75%.

Reviews At Your Fingertips

Nosh Pit is one of the magazine’s most popular sections, featuring restaurant reviews from all over the city. We snagged the restaurants and reviews and consolidated them into a niffty iOS app. Now loyal readers are never more than a few taps away from finding a great place to eat!

100% Custom Rails Admin

The Seattle Met team really wanted to be able to control what was shown to users. They wanted to be able to have dynamic widgets on their site (i.e. most popular articles, most watched videos, or another combination of any of their content many types) that would be powered by curation, but also data and user behavior. And they wanted all of this content to be super flexible and configurable by the people who are the experts (their editors) – without having to talk to a developer or deploy new code to their website.

This site is a truly one of a kind for a news site, and built from the ground up. In collaboration with the Urban Influence design team the Seattle Met team came up with a drag and drop admin interface that allowed them to have complete control of what was shown to users, configure all of the content, and customize the look and feel of different parts of their site – dynamically and easily.