The news site that behaves like a native app

Quartz is a digitally-native news site aimed at business people in the new, post-financial crisis economy. The website is intriguing, not least because it looks and behaves much like a native app, but in a way that doesn’t feel alien to the web.

"We wanted to create a product tailored to mobile and tablet devices," says editor-in-chief, Kevin Delaney, "while having a site that was accessible via the free and open web." For the design, his team took an unusual approach.

"We started with tablet as the primary design reference and then, with the architecture in place, designed for mobile and desktop," says Delaney. "This worked well, and we’re likely to adopt it for future projects."

Websites that try to mimic native applications are prone to falling apart on the web. Quartz however is truly web native, adapting well to its different environments.

Homepage requests/size: 67/1.06MB mobile, 68/1.09MB desktop

This showcase was originally published in .net magazine issue 236.

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