FutureBrand : Sampling content

A way to have your index and read it.

The Site

FutureBrand, a US-based brand development consultancy, allows individual news articles to be previewed alongside the index of headlines.

FutureBrand’s News area opens on a split-screen view where the headline and date of release of articles are listed in an Index to the left and the most recent article is displayed in full to the right. Selecting another headline from the Index refreshes the Articles display to show the new article.

Each side of the screen has an independent sliding navigation bar for scrolling content, while the selected headline is highlighted in red in the Index and by a change in the symbol that prefixes it from plus (+) to a tick (√). The section menu (About us) is a constant on the far left of the screen.

The Takeaway

FutureBrand provides journalists and other interested visitors a clean simple way to sample the content of its News archive quickly. Instead of a click on the headline opening the article and losing the archive index, which is the usual arrangement, the split-screen device allows the list of headlines to remain in view and thus instantly accessible.

Anything such as this that helps the busy journalist or site user in a hurry to find the content they need with minimum fuss is worth considering. Other, less technical options, include cataloguing the archive by topic or, simplest of all, writing clear headlines.

First published on 05 February, 2008