Mark Porter

Tina Brown’s new endeavour The Daily Beast is now up. It’s basically a news aggregator, but with a strong editorial slant (or as TB puts it, “sensibility, darling”). It’s also the first web product from one of the most distinguished magazine editors around.

The front has rather too many gradients and drop shadows, but there’s a nice tabloid energy, and a pleasing simplicity (5 things in the nav bar, limited number of sections and trails, just a couple of screens long).

Dig a little deeper and there are some interesting griddy formats that serve up the content in a very different way from the plain vanilla presentation you find in most aggregators.

Overall, it shows that the guv’nor comes from the magazine world, and the result is probably a little OTT and over-reliant on PNGs for a fast-moving news-based site, but it’s good to see someone pushing the boundaries and doing web design with a bit of personality (darling).