Case Study
ZEITmagazin ONLINE
A digital home for magazine journalism
ZEIT ONLINE is one of Germany’s most prestigious media brands, serving an audience of over 6 million users each month. ZEITmagazin ONLINE is their home for daily magazine journalism covering fashion, culture and all things current affairs.
This project was the first stage in our long and ongoing collaboration with ZEIT ONLINE. ZEITmagazin wanted to push the boundaries of digital journalism in Germany, especially within the realm of magazine journalism, making the most of what the digital environment has to offer—something many media outlets in Germany were failing to take advantage of.
We worked together with ZEIT ONLINE’s writers, editors, marketers and developers to establish a shared understanding of the project. With the editorial team, we developed flexible storytelling formats, starting the process with paper prototypes: from small cards with short content and regular articles to immersive image galleries and long-form content.
In an agile process, we simultaneously designed and built the new ZEITmagazin ONLINE together with their in-house development team.
Their content offering is now fully responsive and designed for all devices. Building the site from scratch, our focus was on creating rich story formats and giving the editorial team the freedom to choose from a range of different layouts. With a wide range of design templates, every type of content has its respective form of display and each article can be customized and tailored by editors.
ZEITmagazin ONLINE received the Lead Award for “Web Magazine of the Year”, and for our design work we were awarded the German Design Award 2015 for excellent communication design in digital media.
You just need an excellent team. We’d been looking for an agency that mastered both design as well as technology for quite a while, and in Germany we found exactly that.Jochen Wegner, Editor-in-Chief ZEIT ONLINE, on our collaboration in kress.de
