No More Multi Column Layouts

by Rian

When I started preparing Mad Tea Party back in early 2010, I recall I had a decision to make. The era of widescreen, 16:9 resolution, was here to stay. But most journals, magazines, and even newspapers didn’t print in widescreen. When they had the precious space, they either reserved the saving for the new advertisement, or they ran multi-column articles to save even more space so that the one story would fit nicely on one sheet of paper.

In the early days of Mad Tea Party, we had two-column layout for both the posts and the homepage. Two-column layout fell out of fashion incredibly quick, especially for the post themselves. It was a nagging task to keep track of where the next bit of texts will be as one is scrolling through an article. Multi-column didn’t work on dynamic medium. Or maybe there is a way, and I had had failed. Either way, it is now a standard practice not to use multi-column for articles and posts.

Simultaneously, I had offers from different contributors and authors to help out with filling the page, so creating a homepage layout that is very much reminiscent of newspaper or “retro”, sounded like a fitting plan. I thought, it would be easier for readers on widescreen computers and writers to get used to the new digital format. Until I realized it was still a terrible plan, as it suffered from the similar issues as regular posts; there is no guarantee in what order the posts will be shown. This isn’t printed medium, and lack of rigidity wasn’t helping.

The only reason, by that I mean, only fiscal reason why I kept the design was due to the whole “featured image”. Not only search engines would prefer to have an image associated with a post, apparently readers would rather see a stock image than not having anything at all. So I had to make a choice; either I find a stock image service that provides high resolution images for free or affordable price, or keep the magazine layout.

Today, I chose to go all-in on the single layout for both the posts and the homepage. No doubt there are some more works to be done, but for the most part it should be one, singular, flow of posts, not triple-column layout as it used to be. I’m somewhat genuinely surprised by the fact that some free stock footages actually offer higher resolution images than the press-kit I use for review spiels. Regardless, for the time being, praise the stock footages and digital era. It wouldn’t have been possible to make the jump without the efforts photographers and illustrators share online.