Our Client
The Las Vegas Review-Journal is a major daily newspaper based in Las Vegas, Nevada. It is the largest circulating daily newspaper in Nevada and is ranked as one of the top 25 newspapers in the United States by circulation. The Las Vegas Review-Journal also owns 9 affiliate publications in addition to the main publication.
Their Challenge
The publication changed ownership multiple times within a short period of time. The digital presence wasn’t tended to or updated in years. This impeded their ability to flexibly reach their audiences with award winning reporting and equally impeded their ability to monetize with modern advertising capabilities.
The Solution
Once we created a baseline information architecture (previous engagement) Vindicati established primary publishing templates, created design concepts, and redesigned the entirety of LVRJ.com in 3 months. We achieved this by iterative batching of design deliverables, working in unison with the stakeholder team, and identifying how the design ties into the new CMS for cyclical handoff.
Project highlights
Conceptualize
Concepts are useful to help a team stretch their imagination while reigning in the realities of possibility. For LVRJ, Vindicati had to balance modern advertising packaging against the flexibility of proper editorial storytelling. All of this while still maintaining a “Las Vegas” feel. Concepts also helped individual team understand the limitations of their editorial and sales capabilities and areas they could grow.
Cyclical Batching
Once a concept was refined and complete, Vindicati worked in cyclical fashion to create grayscale wireframes for speed, and hi fidelity designs for visual refinement. We selected templates and design order to coincide with development involvement. By planning which templates we would design and when, Vindicati fit perfectly into a preexisting sprint cycle.
Launch
Rather than handing complete designs off to the dev team, Vindicati sat with the editorial, sales and development teams to review each module in every template. We would discuss how Editorial publishes, default views, nomenclature, and defined how the entire publishing system would work. This exercise level set expectations across all teams and allowed for a successful launch.