Bloomberg Business is a splash, not a redesign

Caroline O’Donovan of Nieman Lab writes about the new Bloomberg Business website and interviewed Bloomberg digital editor Josh Topolsky about its creation.

O’Donovan writes, “Did Topolsky set out to build a digital that both horrified and intrigued? With simplicity — think Quartz — dominating thinking about business news design, it makes sense that Bloomberg would go for a splash. But as this chart of Bloomberg homepages over the last five years shows, the new look is quite a deviation for the typically more sober finance news company. Topolsky, who says he expected a surprised reaction to the launch, isn’t worried.

“‘I’ve seen some people who are weirded out by it,’ he says. ‘I think some of the best news and web design is a little bit uncomfortable when you first see it.’ (The Verge’s brash use of color was similarly divisive at launch.)

“While the color-washed images and scroll-to-reveal headlines are eye-catching (and sometimes a little buggy), Topolsky emphasized that there’s more happening here than just surface-level change. Those who noticed that both businessweek.com and bloombergbusiness.com redirect to the new Bloomberg homepage will have guessed that much of the new approach is about recentering the Bloomberg media brand. (Bloomberg reportedly loses hundreds of millions a year on its media businesses; its terminal business is the big moneymaker.) The company is made up of many moving parts — there’s the original Bloomberg News, Bloomberg Businessweek, Bloomberg Markets (for terminal subscribers), Bloomberg Pursuits (a luxury print magazine), plus radio and TV. Says Topolsky: ‘The trick is, how do you pull them together and make it feel natural?’

“Behind the scenes, that means consolidating newsroom staff from Businessweek and Bloomberg News into a single team. On the website, that means capturing some of the zany sensibility and visual language that Businessweek under Josh Tyrangiel has become known for — some of Topolsky’s favorite covers in recent memory are below — and applying it to Bloomberg’s broader digital identity.”