Introducing our newest Largo redesign: Workday Minnesota

Workday Minnesota began publishing in 2000 with support from Minnesota’s labor community and was the first online labor news publication in the United States. Since then, Workday has won many awards and has grown to be a trusted source for news about workers, the economy, worker organizations, and Minnesota communities. It is a project of the Labor Education Service at the University of Minnesota.

This summer, INN Labs teamed up with Workday Minnesota’s editor, Filiberto Nolasco Gomez, and webmaster John See to migrate their outdated Drupal site to the Largo WordPress framework and redesign their brand.

Our goals for this project were to:

  • give Workday Minnestoa a streamlined and modern look and feel
  • improve site performance for readers and usability on the back-end for editors
  • enhance the design and improve engagement for Workday’s long-form investigative pieces
  • empower the Workday team to easily manage and update their WordPress site after launch

Some of our design inspiration came from INN Members with bold, modern designs (such as The Marshall Project, The Intercept and Reveal News) and some from outside of our industry, like nowness.com. We wanted clean, bold headlines, a thoughtful type hierarchy, and a way for photos to take center stage. 

Here's what Filiberto had to say:

“We focused on what it would take to rebuild Workday to be responsive to our readers and enhance investigative reporting. The new website will allow us to display long-form and investigative journalism in a more attractive and readable interface. This version of Workday will also allow us to effectively use multimedia segments to make what can sometimes be dense material more approachable.”

The INN Labs team is excited for this new phase of Workday Minnesota and thankful for the opportunity to help bring it to life.

Out with the old, in with the new

Before and after the workdayminnesota.org redesign.

We created a custom homepage layout that showcases Workday’s latest content with a clean and modern look.

Benefits of this custom homepage are big visuals for larger screens and ease of navigation on smaller screens. Workday editors have room for both curated news from around the web (using the Link Roundups plugin) and their most recently published articles.

A sleek and modern article layout

Workday Minnesota articles, before and after.
A typical Workday Minnesota article, before and after.

Article pages continue the sleek, clean design approach. We left out ads and ineffective sidebars in order to prioritize long reads with custom-designed pull quotes and large, responsively embedded photos and videos. Behind the scenes, our Largo framework works with the new WordPress Gutenberg editor to add essential editing tools for media organizations.

Workday Minnesota's redesign is responsive to all devices.

But wait – there’s more!

We couldn’t stop with just a website redesign without also giving attention to the heart of the brand – the logo. The redesigned logo builds off of the modern, new typefaces for the website and its bold use of the Minnesota state outline (Filiberto’s idea!) is great for lasting brand recognition. In the process of creating the logo, we also incorporated a new tagline that succinctly expresses the mission of Workday Minnesota: “Holding the powerful accountable through the perspective of workers.” The new logo is now being used on the website and across Workday’s social media channels.

Workday Minnesota's new logos.

Questions? Get in touch.

Have a question for our team or need help with WordPress design and/or development? Check out INN Labs full services here, join us for one of our weekly Office Hours, or get in touch!