By David Topping

Miracle of miracles! A month after Eye‘s paper got a new layout, its website finally got one too. And while it’s (predictably) gray and white and red all over, the changes aren’t only cosmetic. Eye‘s online editor, Stuart Berman, told Torontoist in an email this morning that “our previous homepage—while visually robust—didn’t fully communicate the idea that eyeweekly.com is very much a daily operation. Now, our new content is displayed in a more logical, chronological flow as opposed to being segregated to specific sections. As a result of the new homepage design, we’ll be ramping up our daily efforts even more.” Why, that all sounds just like a blog!
The site is both more and less tidy than it was before. While the newer articles now go on top of the old ones, and there are some nice new fonts and images shoved together with ugly old ones, good luck if you actually want to read any actual content: one thousand words of teeny-tiny sans-serif text with no images to break it doesn’t exactly make the process easy. Berman, of course, is quick to mention that they’re only in “the first phase of what will be an extensive stage-by-stage redesign of the entire site over the next few months—from here, we’ll be burrowing deeper into the site to revise section and article layouts as well as revamp the presentation of our listings.” But there’s one big thing that’s missing now from the redesign that it may be too late to fix: any unique visual identity whatsoever. NOW‘s website, messy and awful as it is, at least looks and feels and reads like NOW; Eye‘s new layout could belong to almost any publication in the world. Still, as far as websites go, “logical” is always a big step in the right direction.