Something To Say Between The Lines
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A look at themes on IGN when you visit them today
Something New
As you visit our homepage this morning and today you might have noticed something different, something you may not have seen before on IGN.
Today we are rolling out a new feature on IGN that we're calling themes -- very creative, I know. As the name implies, this feature themes the IGN homepage with new colors and patterns for a more custom appearance. You’ll notice a toggle located in our navigation that activates and deactivates the theme. We wanted to give users the choice in using this theme and we hope that you enjoy what we have come up with.
“the toggle was very important to us in giving our users a choice when it comes to this experience”
What About Mobile?
As with our current homepage it is responsive so the theme follows suit when viewing it on your phone. This honestly presented some questions when we initially concepted themes as a product. Making something on a mobile device still feel special and important when your space is limited was an interesting problem to solve. I feel like we as a team came to a nice middle ground in allowing the theme to show up and feel important but not overwhelm the user at the same time
Our First Partner
star wars: jedi fallen order
For our first iteration we were very excited to work with the great people behind Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order in anticipation of the release of the game on November 15th. For this theme we adapted the style and feeling of the new game in a way that we feel is subtle but elegant. We also wanted this theme to not be a sensory overload and for that reason chose to scale back how much we affected the elements and design of the page itself. In the end we want users to want to activate and use these themes, not see them as an eyesore.
The Future of Themes
where we’re going, we’ll probably still need roads
As I mentioned above, the introduction of themes on IGN holds many implications for the future. You can look forward to more themes, from basic things like an IGN dark mode to more designs inspired by IPs you love.
We have received more requests than I can count over the years for something like a dark mode, and now with themes we have that ability in the future. All of this comes with the ability to toggle any of these themes on/off as our users see fit.
We hope you enjoy what we have done with this first theme, we can’t wait to continue building on this and share with you what else we have in store.
Thank you to everyone who has worked on this project, everyone from our incredible Engineering staff, our Sales team, our Ad Ops team, our product managers and our Design team (myself included) who put a lot of love and effort into making this something special.
You can look forward to more posts from us in the future about new products, logo redesigns and other general goings on when it comes to Product + Engineering here at IGN. Thanks for reading!
ONCE 4 lyfe
