Syracuse University's student newspaper The Daily Orange unveiled their new website early this morning. The site's been totally revamped, and ported from the archaic College Publisher system. Designer John Boilard took the lead on this project and worked with the DO to design a site that matches their look, workflow, and the needs of their readers.

This isn't the first time we've redesigned the Daily Orange. Anyone who's met Tito, Jared or me and stayed around for longer than an hour probably knows we worked at the college paper together. It's how we all met, and where we learned to do what we do. We're going to publish a full-on portfolio post about the whole site in a few weeks, and point out its many new features. But today let's just take a look at where the site came from:

The late 90's

This is one of the earliest screencaps on archive.org for the DO. It's got the 90's bracketed DO flag/logo, and a whole lot of link blue. Also, cloudy with a chance of gifs?

The early 2000's

The printed paper was looking really good during this period. Probably the high water mark of print design in the DO was around this time, with Tito's excellent redesign. Unfortunately the paper had just gone to College Publisher, and the design was still pretty crusty. "You're saying I can get this email newsletter for free!?"

The Jared Years

Jared had just started as Online Editor, a position I'm pretty sure he invented. He redesigned the site one line of css at a time, and came out with this instant classic. It worked pretty well, as long as Jared was there to work it. Bonus trivia: the basketball guide tease in the lower right corner was shot by our friend Geordie Wood, who now spends his time shooting rappers and models as the photo editor at The Fader.

The last days of CP

In recent years, the website has had this kind of split personality of DO control and the order imposed by College Publisher as their CMS, ad network, and host. So while they have good design ideas, and great content, the staff hadn't been able to mess with the website and really learn about web design and online publishing.

2012

The world's changed a lot since we went to SU (what's a smartphone?), and the paper needs to be able to change with it. We're proud to have helped the Daily Orange over this last hurdle, and are excited to see what they do with the site now that it's in their hands.

Congrats to John, Jared and Tito for launching this beast, and to the Daily Orange for making it all possible.