Fergana News Agency

Online newsroom design system and website redesign

Central Asia is a complex and turbulent region. Five different countries, five styles of politics. A news resource covering such a region is guaranteed to have an interesting fate and a complicated agenda every day.
We've developed a design system that allows you to collect news pages, main section pages, and home pages for each region. Simple, efficient and fast. We've made the design of the news portal a design game.

Now, depending on their news agenda, page editors can assemble their texture by "highlighting" some news and suppressing others, aggregating news into stories, and rapidly putting together headlines and breaking news — for a particular section, a particular country, or the full site.
How it was:
For designers, creating a news portal is the ultimate challenge. After all, it's easy to draw a static picture, but how do you draw a live environment whose content changes several times a day, and sometimes several times an hour? And this is only one section. One of the five countries. The designer has to predict all possible scenarios.

Designing a news portal is that rare case where the design system works at maximum efficiency. It's versatile and scalable, fully manageable by taking simple steps in the interfaces of production editors, journalists and bilds.

The number of possible combinations of blocks, cards and tiles runs into the hundreds.
How to make a design system for a news resource? Conduct an inventory of entity types. Create a hierarchical system. Understand, for example, how news is different from breaking news. How a country page is different from a rubric. Define the relationships between all the entities. Calculate the grid. Design each block, each tile - and make it versatile and dynamically scalable. Heck, it's a piece of cake, isn't it?
A news site is filled by a whole team, and it's impossible to limit formats and proportions. The header can be one letter and three lines, the photo can be square, vertical or wide panorama, or no photo at all. And the design had to allow for all variants.
Editorial interface design

Journalists write news and articles, the editor sets the objectives and sets the agenda for the country or section. The Bild fills the stories with images. The editor-in-chief sets the agenda for the whole publication and sees progress and statuses.

Every profession has a different role in the system. With possibilities and limitations.

Baturin Group makes it so no one has opportunity to mess up.
The editor needs a tool to compile the news picture of the day, to prioritise the news. Separately for each of the five countries, separately for each of the many headlines. So, the "home page", "home page of Uzbekistan" and "Uzbekistan-Economics" entities have to be set up separately.

We made a builder that allows you to assign each block of the page to the right template from numerous predefined ones. And fill each field in that block with content. Quick, flexible and intuitive.

Конструктор — интерфейс выпускающего редактора
Fergana News Agency website
Done in 7 months:
300
Site artboards, pages and sub-systems of the administrative interface
350
Screens of the adaptive version of the design
18000
Messages in four chat rooms (development and editing)
200
Conference hours