nsmb 2.0*
New Und Improved
Words by Cam McRae and Dave Smith.
There is a word in German for an upgrade that actually ends up being a downgrade - verschlimmbessert. Windows users will be familiar with this concept. Like zeitgeist, schadenfreude and schnapps, this word captures a condition we’re familiar with in our culture but for which we have no word. Ze Germans are so clever.
Verschlimmbessert is what we were trying to avoid. Change for the sake of change. Many of you told us you were happy with the way nsmb.com looked and the way it navigated. At least up until about 2004 that is. So while we massaged two other designs until they were close to launch, we scrapped them in the end because they didn’t quite nail the tranny. We weren't looking for bells and whistles and we knew we couldn’t just change a few colours - so we stepped back for a time.
And then Dave Smith came along...
Cam McRae
I have a big mouth and part of having a big mouth is I can find all kinds of ways to lodge my mud splattered 510s squarely between my molars. It all started innocently enough about a year ago when talking to Cam over coffee. I remarked about how nostalgic I felt for 2000 and the boy-bands of yesteryear whenever I visited NSMB. His response was that I might want to take a stab at redesigning the site if I was going to shoot my mouth off. My answer was a self-assured, "sure, I'll give it a go" and that was to be my first taste of shoe leather. I have designed a lot of websites and worked on campaigns for all sizes of clients but I really didn't think about what it
would be like designing a site that I visit every day. My usual routine of rocking out a design and then never, ever staring at the work again wasn't going to fly this time. I visit NSMB pretty regularly and beyond just having to look at my work I knew that if I screwed up I would have to deal with the yahoos on the Board. NSMB board members are a healthy mix of cranky old bastards and smart ass kids and I count myself lucky among them on a daily basis. However, I do know what kind of trouble I can expect when the site goes live since I will no longer be able hide behind my avatar. I suppose the least I can do is explain my thinking and then you can hack away to your collective hearts' content.
The challenge of designing an e-mag like NSMB is in managing the volume of content. The new design compartmentalizes information into easily digested bites while at the same time the new aesthetic that I developed is meant to bind the whole package together. The look and feel was largely inspired by the simple fact that the North Shore is a cold, dark, wet, foggy, forest-draped, wonderland. For inspiration, I drew heavily from the photographs of Sterling Lorence and the posters of Sheppard Fairy. Sterl's black and white photographs pretty much sum up everything about riding on the Shore. They usually feature the solitary silhouette of a rider slogging over wet, muddy roots that look like an insane cat's cradle - and that is what I have tried to emulate in the site's design. The heavily posterized artwork and photographs have been treated to be more texture than anything else, sitting behind the individual modules. As the dude would say - they really tie the room together. The modules are a mix of standard html and some fancier expandable nav structures that are again designed deliver content in bite-sized pieces. As to the heavy written content of the magazine, it will be formatted similar to what people are used to seeing on NSMB but use larger photographs and more of them. That's where the real 2.0 aspect of the site comes in and Norman Tan has once again done a bang up job on the back-end that allows NSMB admins to broadcast news on the fly. I could wax poetic about the use of black to create drama while letting the brightly coloured typographic details pop, but I won't because my big mouth is quite honestly tired. I am now going to go suckle at the teat of the sweet mother Anchor Steam Beer.
Thanks to Norm for the hours he had to put up with me changing things from blue to black to orange and finally back to black again. I of course have to also give a big thanks to our commander in chief, Cam for letting me put my money where my 510s usually reside.
Dave Smith is an award winning graphic designer from Vancouver currently working as Sr Art Director at Engine Digital.
Dave's really out of date portfolio is located here
We haven’t migrated all content yet and there may be a few bugs but it was time to go live, so here we are. We’d be happy to hear your feedback and learn about any gremlins you find. Please let us know what operating system and browser you are using – and send us a screen shot I that’s appropriate as well. Send this stuff to me and I’ll distribute it to the appropriate fixer.
*Remember nsmb.com 1.0? Most of you won’t. Michael Palethorpe did nsmb.com 1.5, a tweak of his original design, in the spring of 2001, but otherwise nothing’s changed about our front page since the very beginning - in June of 2000. The design was mostly complete before January of that year so it’s nice to be finally entering the 21st century.
Below you’ll find some technical info from Norman to help you find your way on the new nsmb.com.
RSS Feeds
Almost all content on NSMB now can be syndicated through your favourite RSS reader. For more information on this, please visit this page:
http://dev.nsmb.com//index.php/page/s/278/rss-feeds-nsmb
Site Wide Search
Found to the right of every page – lets you search across the entire NSMB website - and our bulletin boards - using Google technology
Forums
Our bulletin boards have come a long way and it’s a community that we’re now – dare I say it – very proud of. If you’d like to toss your hat in click here to sign up. Just want to look around? Right this way…
Note on Content
We’re still moving stuff around so for the next few weeks, you may find a number of broken links. Rest assured that our hired hands are hard at work and we’re working around the clock to bring you the best mountain biking web site in the world.
Browsers:
NSMB.com was designed with standards in mind and supports the following browsers. IE 6.0+, FireFox 2.0+, Safari 3+ and Opera 9+. We also make use of Javascript so it’s highly recommended that you enable it.
