I just learned about this new journal on Twitter today, and am very impressed with what they've done with OJS:
- Their overall use of colours, typography, and white space are very visually appealing.
- The integration of the header image and navigation bar works really well and saves on space.
- They've simplified the sidebar, retaining just the most important information.
- They radically reworked the default OJS navigation choices, for the better, in my opinion:
- Login and Register have been moved to a new navigation bar at the top of the page. We're going in this direction with OJS 3, and it looks great here.
- They've promoted Editorial Team, Submissions, and Contact to the main navigation bar. These are critical pieces of information and deserve being highlighted here.
- They've simplified the About page substantially, and moved much of the information down to the footer. This is a much more contemporary approach to information navigation and, again, looks great.
- Given prominence to social media linking, which is becoming increasingly important for journals (and helps to highlight the benefits of OA - you can tweet a link and your followers won't hit a paywall).
- They've developed a companion site on Wordpress to serve as their main community site, allowing them to extend their content with shorter pieces/blog posts and make good use of visuals.
This has required not only obvious graphic design expertise, but also some significant developer skill, as these kinds of changes require modifications to the underlying code.
We're very pleased that the Journal of Applied Social Theory decided to use OJS and we welcome them to our community!