Vox Product Blog

An invisible interface: 6 things we learned from designing for voice

By Sanette Tanaka Aug 22, 2016, 9:33a

How to design for an interface you can't see

TechGirls visit Vox Media

By Ramla Mahmood Aug 18, 2016, 9:50a

Vox Product recently hosted a group of four teenage girls from Algeria, Jordan, Tunisia and Morocco for a day of job shadowing and workshops. They are part of an initiative called TechGirls – an international exchange program led by the State...

From Vox Media Storytelling Blog

Steal our accessibility best practices presentation

By Kelsey Scherer @kelsa_ Aug 23, 2016, 10:29a

Best practices, tools, and resources for making accessible products

From Vox Media Storytelling Blog

Vox Trump Tax: People take screenshots. Design for that.

By Kelsey Scherer @kelsa_ Aug 19, 2016, 12:09p

When Vox’s team set out to build an election forecast, their model predicted a Republican win. They had built a “fundamental model”: a model that relies on things like the state of the economy, the president’s approval rating, and more. Once you...

Interns

What we learned: A retrospective by Vox Media’s 2016 summer intern class

By Anna Brown , Kaitlin Gu , Jon Moss , Swapnil Kasliwal , Noelle Ingrisano , Ali Sidiki and Ryan Connors Aug 11, 2016, 12:49p

This summer, interns from SB Nation, Eater, and Vox Product came together to create Powering the Olympics, an in-depth feature that explored how athletes, restaurants, and the city of Rio De Janeiro are preparing for the games. The interns had the...

TIL

Making intrinsic ratio elements with a max height

By Guillermo Esteves Aug 10, 2016, 3:00p

Here's something that took me longer than I care to admit to figure out how to do. I have a photoblog where I post the photos I take; I like to display them at high resolution, but when they're in a portrait orientation (like this one), you...

How I got started contributing to Rails

By Jon Moss Aug 10, 2016, 12:00p

Open source is driven by a dedicated team of volunteers. Let’s learn more about the process from a Rails Issues Team member!

From Vox Media Storytelling Blog

The importance of design research and moodboarding in storytelling

By Brittany Holloway-Brown Aug 8, 2016, 10:08a

For the Storytelling Studio, research is just as important as execution. We stress knowing why we make decisions before we even begin to think about how we’d execute them. Part of our ethos is getting to the heart of the story. Before starting...

From Vox Media Storytelling Blog

On building a culture of documentation

By Lauren Rabaino Jul 29, 2016, 6:55p

When your team is remote, distributed, highly collaborative, and fast-paced, having solid documentation is core to effectiveness. Before we were the Storytelling Studio, our teams who did this kind of work developed a system for building...

From Vox Media Storytelling Blog

Behind the scenes of the Hillary Clinton interview

By Lauren Rabaino , Kainaz Amaria , Sanette Tanaka and Katie O'Dowd Jul 28, 2016, 9:13a

We got a phone call on the evening of June 20 letting us know that Ezra Klein had landed a 40-minute interview with Hillary Clinton and that our design director, Kainaz Amaria, would be flying out to make photos. We took a deep breath and set a...

TIL

Making intrinsic ratio elements with a max height

By Guillermo Esteves Aug 10, 2016, 3:00p

Here's something that took me longer than I care to admit to figure out how to do. I have a photoblog where I post the photos I take; I like to display them at high resolution, but when they're in a portrait orientation (like this one), you...

Getting BrowserSync to work with Gulp and the Rails Asset Pipeline

By Winston Hearn Jan 22, 2016, 10:44a

It turns out they can work together!

Accessibility design 101: Contrast and legibility

By Kelsey Scherer @kelsa_ May 22, 2015, 5:22p

I recently came across an application (thanks to our accessibility Slack room) that allows you to test the contrast levels of colors you're using with an eyedropper, rather than enter hex codes. The problem: I have used the WAVE chrome extension...

Finding the source of DOM mods in Webkit Inspector

By Casey Kolderup Mar 24, 2015, 10:41a

Sometimes, when you're debugging an issue in the browser, you might spot an attribute of an element or an entire or subtree in the DOM that is getting left there by some Javascript that's executing when you load the page. Here's how to explore that!

From Vox Media Storytelling Blog

Behind the scenes of Racked's 'Reign, Supreme' story

By Brittany Holloway-Brown , Tyson Whiting and Aidan Feay Jul 28, 2016, 9:10a

How do you explain a story in 15 different parts?

Source
VAX

Open sourcing our accessibility guidelines

By Kelsey Scherer , ally palanzi , Winston Hearn and Sanette Tanaka Jul 18, 2016, 3:11p

As journalists, advertisers, producers, and creators, content is at our core at Vox Media. We want to ensure that everyone—regardless of ability, situation, or context—can access it.

Vox Product's Kit & Caboodle, June 2016

By Katharine Molloy Jul 1, 2016, 10:23a

A monthly collection of design work from the Product Team at Vox Media

Interns

Meet our Summer 2016 intern class

By Kaitlin Gu Jun 29, 2016, 11:55a

Meet Vox Media's Summer 2016 intern class

Transitioning into design management: 6 lessons learned

By Alisha Ramos Jun 21, 2016, 3:47p

I first joined Vox Media as a Front-End Designer coding and designing various apps, platforms, and editorial projects. As of March, I’m now a Design Director. Here are some lessons I’ve learned in my first three months of transitioning from being...

Development

Reducing the start render time on Chorus

By Ian Carrico Jun 16, 2016, 2:12p

In May, we deployed a change that decreased our start render time immensely. This is how we found, built, tested, and deployed the code that did it.

Remote User Testing at Vox

By Gregg Bernstein May 26, 2016, 2:35p

I recently joined Vox Media as Senior User Researcher, where I work remotely with a distributed team that relies heavily on asynchronous communication. As the sole researcher, my tasks run the research gamut—from interviews and user tests to...

AMP, Instant Articles, and Vox Media, explained

By Elite Truong May 13, 2016, 10:30a

It’s been a few months since we launched three of our brands – SB Nation, The Verge, and Vox.com – on the AMP format in partnership with Google and a number of other publishers and technology companies, including Twitter. This is really exciting...

Accessibility matters—and here's what we're doing about it

By Sanette Tanaka , Winston Hearn and Kelsey Scherer May 11, 2016, 10:45a

As journalists, advertisers, producers, and creators, content is at our core at Vox Media. And we want to ensure that everyone—regardless of ability, situation, or context—can access it.

Behind the scenes: Recode design process

By Courtney Leonard May 10, 2016, 12:54p

We just re-launched Recode, our tech/business news and analysis brand. For our Brand Identity team, this marked a different type of redesign. Not only did we have to look at the site and all social platforms, but we had to imagine the brand in a...

Bots for discovering related content

By Elena Zheleva and Yian Shang Apr 27, 2016, 11:07a

A Slackbot powered by a neural network

How designers can use unit testing to build resilient and happy design systems

By Alisha Ramos Apr 20, 2016, 9:03a

Adapting a method from programming for product design

Themes from #Clarity2016

By Kelsey Scherer , ally palanzi and Ngan Hoang Apr 7, 2016, 9:42a

Last week, ten Vox Product members met in San Francisco to attend Clarity, a conference about style guides and design systems. As a growing company, this is something that we (like everyone!) are struggling with internally and trying improve on. F...

Events

Steal My Tool @ NICAR

By Ryan Mark Mar 23, 2016, 10:59a

News nerds show off eight open source tools for stealing

Voxmedia.com is now live on Chorus!

By Chris Haines Mar 2, 2016, 1:09p

Two weeks ago, we wrote about launching Curbed on Chorus and the Unison project that led up to it. So we built a more unified, highly-customizable Chorus, with a flexible set of design components that can scale for many different types of...

Behind the scenes: Curbed design process

By Courtney Leonard , Yesenia Perez-Cruz and Georgia Cowley Feb 23, 2016, 8:48a

Yesterday we relaunched Curbed, our owned and operated brand about interiors, homes, architecture, cities, and property for sale. Not only is it the first of Vox Media's websites to be positioned on a new version of Chorus, our proprietary...

Curbed on Chorus, the start of a new era at Vox Media

By Lauren Rabaino , Chris Haines and Yesenia Perez-Cruz Feb 23, 2016, 8:41a

On Monday, we relaunched Curbed on Chorus, the final brand from November 2013's Curbed Network acquisition to migrate to Vox Media's platform. Though today's launch might look like any other Chorus site on the surface, it marks a significant...

Vox Product's Kit & Caboodle, January 2016

By Tyson Whiting Feb 17, 2016, 9:44a

A monthly collection of design work from the Product Team at Vox Media

Building an inclusive culture

By Mandy Brown Nov 10, 2015, 11:42a

On the product team and throughout Vox Media, we've made a commitment to foster a welcoming, inclusive environment that's safe for people of all backgrounds, including historically underrepresented groups such as people of color, LGBTQ people, and...

Events

Pixel Punch 2015: A (spooky) Recap

By Kelsey Scherer @kelsa_ Nov 4, 2015, 11:37a

It’s midnight on All Hallow’s Eve, and you’re driving down a desolate, winding road on your way to a party. Suddenly your car starts to sputter, lurching forward, before dying. You reach for your phone to call for help but, alas! Your phone has no...

Better workplaces: Lessons from Forge Conf

By Yuri Victor Oct 26, 2015, 11:38a

I attended Forge Conference a few weeks ago and was really lucky to have the chance to talk with a bunch of people there about process. Process has always fascinated me because it’s really easy to see bad processes (Here’s me talking about taking...

Behind the scenes of Eater's Danny Meyer feature

By Kelsey Scherer @kelsa_ Oct 16, 2015, 10:24a

Ryan Sutton, the chief restaurant critic at Eater New York, reported that Danny Meyer was eliminating tipping from all of his restaurants. We had a major exclusive on the news and good lead time, which allowed us to consider how the content would...

Events

Join us for our design showdown, Pixel Punch

By Kelsey Scherer @kelsa_ Aug 31, 2015, 1:57p

Apply today to be a contestant or judge

Events

Lessons from prototyping the future with teens

By Lauren Rabaino and Kelsey Scherer Aug 13, 2015, 9:48a

On Friday, August 7, Vox Product, Spotify Design, and Hyper Island hosted a one-day workshop with teens from the Kips Bay Boys and Girls Club to invent the future of communication. Approximately 36 teenagers and 36 professionals working in product...

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