One blog. All of Google.
Before The Keyword, Google publicized mostly through hundreds of dissociated blogs with no central editorial or design control. There was almost no brand voice and many important stories got lost in the shuffle. Our solution was to replace them with what is essentially an online newspaper with a single company as its subject.
Article page—
Pushing the Google visual brand in an editorial direction created a more thoughtful tone for the content. The core brand was integrated through typography and by having authors select one of the four primary brand colors as a visual theme for each article.
Increased immersion—
Most traffic enters directly to an article, making this the actual "landing" page, so we need ways to discover more content as easily as possible. Related articles are organized into a reading list which is browsed via the in-page modules or sticky bar seen above. The end of the article also presents content options to load in place.
The front page—
Content is organized into groups by company product or editorial topic, each with a featured story and visually distinguished through color. The flexible grid system works whether articles have images and comments or not.
Infographics—
Some frequently recurring content like Search Trends have custom designed and branded features like this map.
Collections—
A way for Google to tell larger stories by manually curating articles from many of the standard Product and Topic categories.
Product page—
The destination for all product-specific news and the standardized replacement for many of the isolated legacy blogs. Letting the lead content overlap the product brand area at the top helps clarify that this is a content page and not the site to download the product itself.
Partial module library—
Early sketches—
Live site >
Design team: Greg Zulkie, Brad Stell, Dave Tupper, Johan Rundberg