Good and Poor Visual Design

Good Visual Design - NY Times via Chrome Browser

NY Times Chrome site in "Overview" view

You can have an enhanced experience visiting the NY Times website using the Google Chrome browser.  If you go to http://www.nytimes.com/chrome, you will be presented with a very elegant layout of text and images on the screen.  Using a selection of layouts, a user can taylor how the news is presented. The thumbnails themselves serve as a representation (or preview) of what the actual layout will look like if it is chosen.  Below is an image of the "Gallery View" which only shows images from articles, but if you roll over the image you get the headline (and clicking brings up the full text).  I think that the designers of this site have put a lot of thought into how the information is organized visually and how the layout, graphics, and images represent the hierarchical and informational structure of the news.

NY Times Chrome site in Gallery View

Poor Visual Design - The Drudge Report

The Drudge Report home page

The Drudge Report is one of the most poorly designed news sites I have ever encountered.  The page layout conveys no hierarchical structure, and images are used in seemingly random form. One of the worst things about the site is that an advertisement is placed at the top center of the page, and the actual site name is placed below an article heading.  While the images that are from news items do accurately represent an article link that may be located above or below the picture, the position of the photos on the page do not help readers make any sense of how information is presented on the page as a whole.