Responses by Gavin Wade, principal, Jason Mannix, cofounder and Lindsay Mannix, cofounder, Polygraph; Eric Verboncouer, founder, Headway

Background: The site is a digital magazine about the wine, beer and spirits industry. Created as a companion to SevenFifty, a platform for beverage industry professionals, the magazine’s main goal is to create and host interesting, educational and inspiring content for beverage professionals and consumers.

Highlights: We wanted the site to have the traditional feel of magazines and newspapers with convenient digital enhancements. The left rail became a defining element: serving as navigation on hub pages, hosting tags and social icons on articles and serving up counterpoint articles in the voices section.

Challenges: When an online magazine is just getting started, it is difficult to define the exact categorization of future articles and how different it should appear visually. We made some subtle distinctions between article types to help clue the user into different reading experiences.

Navigation structure: We wanted to keep the site navigation simple and uncluttered, with the focus shifting to content once users dig deeper. When reading, we use the related articles and tags to navigate users horizontally through similar content.

Time constraints: Our original designs tied the site much more closely with the functionality of the SevenFifty platform, which allows users to flag products or producers they liked as they read and having that content push to their account when they opened the platform. Time constraints kept us from truly exploring that option and it was moved to a future phase. Someday!

Anything new: This was the first site that we used Asana as our main vehicle for project management and tracking between the different teams. Though it was a bit cumbersome for the early ideation phases, it was useful for web development tracking and the approval process.