Magazines & Publications

 

Building high-end publications with seamless CMS experiences

There is no question that your publication needs to be as beautiful on the web as it is in print. We are as detail-oriented as you are about the tail of the “y” in your titles and the precise indentation level of your block quotes; we want to help you obsess over the little things. We also know, though, that what keeps your publication going day-after-day - and what determines the lifespan of your website - is a CMS that gives you full control of your content while still being easy to use.

 
 
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Noēma Magazine

 

Noēma Magazine, published by the Berggruen Institute, is a magazine of ideas, culture, and international relations. They started, under another name, as a partnership between the Institute and Huffpo, moved to the Washington Post, and finally had us build them their own home under Noēma.

We had to match the absolutely stunning design of the magazine on the web, building a clean, high-end publication that users would enjoy reading on any device, including lots of little touches to make the mobile experience of reading long-form essays a little less overwhelming.

The core of Noēma is an easy-to-use Gutenberg block system, in which we defined the core elements of the article in a way that they could be mixed and matched seamlessly. Non-technical administrative users can generally copy and paste from the Google Docs in which they edit and define each part of the article paragraph by paragraph in a couple of clicks. They can also choose from a variety of font + background color combinations, image arrangements, and elements like footnotes.

We also built out a few bonuses for editors:

  • Google Analytics is integrated directly into the site’s dashboard, so they don’t have to have two windows open at once.

  • We integrated a custom service that can search multiple stock image databases simultaneously into the default Wordpress media upload flow

  • We allowed the business side of the publication to manage subscriptions through Salesforce with a two-way sync between the site and their CRM

 
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Peer

 

The Salvation Army hosts several publications for different parts of their audience - we’ve built all of them. But from our perspective, the crown jewel is Peer. Peer is their youth-focused magazine and is the center of a media ecosystem that includes the print & web publication, podcast series, and regular video content. What makes their website incredible, though, is their art. They don’t just have strong, tasteful photography - they have truly fantastic illustrators. The homepage of the site lets the art lead and the typography has enough personality not to get lost.

Just as with Noēma, we built Peer on a Gutenberg-based block system. Each typographical and imagistic element in the site is defined at the paragraph level, letting administrators control the site without needing to code.

 
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City Journal

 

City Journal, founded in 1990, is the quarterly publication produced by the Manhattan Institute. As part of an overall rebrand of MI’s properties, we did a full redesign of City Journal’s web presence, bring it into the 21st century. CJ’s main strength is that it is part of an ecosystem of MI websites; content published there is automatically published to the Manhattan Institute’s main site, appropriately categorized, and shows up in any search that a user makes there. Editors have full control over every aspect of the site using a heavily customized Drupal interface.

 
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