In December 2012, the New York Times broke out of their standard online post layout and wowed us with John Branch’s beautiful “Snow Fall” article. Instead of simply containing headings, text, and the occasional inline photo, this article made liberal use of full screen images, videos, custom text layouts, and animations to draw readers in and captivate them with a well-designed and well-told story.
It wasn’t long before other publishing sites followed suit and began departing from their “normal” design for occasional art-directed articles, like The Chicago Tribune’s “His Saving Grace” and The Verge’s “longform” articles.
Normally, articles on news sites follow a pretty standard pattern: featured image, headline, content (text, headings, and inline images), with a menu above, a sidebar next-door, and comments and a footer below. The large majority of WordPress sites follow that pattern as well. But with a little help from a couple helpful plugins and a custom template page, you can easily build attention-grabbing art-directed articles in WordPress.
For the sake of this tutorial, let’s pick several unique design elements we’d like to add to our “Snow Fall” layout. We’ll want (1) normal WYSIWYG editor areas, (2) hero images with optional text overlay, and (3) pull-quotes. We’ll also want to use as many of each kind of content as we want, in whatever order we want. Let’s go!
Advanced Custom Fields & Flexible Content Fields
To create customizable layouts, we’ll start with the Advanced Custom Fields plugin (WP Plugin Repo). ACF is free, but we’ll also need one of its paid add-ons: Flexible Content Fields. This add-on is less than $25 (USD) and is well worth it!
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