Fashion Forward
Vogue Italia Website
Content is kept at the center of the experience and comes to the reader in a continuous flow rather than a static hierarchy of navigation.
Italian Vogue is one of the world's most influential and respected fashion magazines, driven by stunning photography and graphic design. Even the ads are meaningful and attractive. For its new website, the editors came to frog looking for something truly original: an innovative concept for publishing content online as well as a solution that would allow them to translate the allure and quality of the print magazine’s visual experience to the digital world.
The challenge from Condé Nast, which owns the Vogue brand, was to create a site that attracts and inspires an international audience of fashion consumers and professionals. They didn't want a literal translation of the monthly magazine: it had to be its own entity in terms of layout and functionality, so that it could be updated daily and host a robust social media community.
In designing the site, frog wanted to preserve the visual allure of the print magazine and avoid the usual layout clichés. There is a grid that gives structure to all the page designs, but each page can be treated quite differently in
terms of graphics and layout, mimicking the highly editorial-driven design in the print magazine. Content is kept at the center of the experience and comes to the reader in a continuous flow rather than a static hierarchy of navigation.
Populating the site is made easier by standard-size modules that can be assembled for an almost infinite number of page layouts. In keeping with the magazine’s legacy, these modules are defined by traditional photographic dimensions, rather than by the usual Web-derived pixel dimensions. This means the page format adapts to the content rather than the other way around. One- to four-column page combinations can be quickly created by Vogue staff.
The frog team led the Web design project from start to finish—including creative direction, interaction design, and technical specifications. All necessary page templates were fully developed in accordance to strict Web standards and are search-engine optimized. We worked with Condé Nast’s technical team to build the content-management system in order to properly support the new page layouts and advertising formats.
