In the summer of 2021, the New York Times Games page went through a scheduled period of maintenance. Even though the service would be unavailable for a few hours, the team saw this as an opportunity to showcase the value of our product.
At the time, the default error page was a blank screen with a Times New Roman, generic announcement. In this context, I was tasked with designing a page that better reflected the values of the New York Times Games, as well as redirecting the traffic of users to other relevant pages within the NYT ecosystem.
My approach was to find visual signifiers for NYT Games. Initially, I planned to create a small crossword board spelling out “MAINTENANCE." However, this posed technical issues, as the page should be up when the Games service was disabled.
Instead, I opted to use branding elements from the NYT Games advertisement campaign. These were blocks, triangles, and lines that mirrored moments of individual games, such as a cluster of cells in the Crossword, or a Letter Boxed solution.
I chose to arrange these blocks as though they were affected by gravity and had fallen, as a representation of the site in need of maintenance. Then, with the same blocks I created a set of illustrations to allow the page to function well across devices.
From here, we arranged the illustrations in the Games navigation and styling the text accordingly.
From this, the team realized that most error pages across the Games site were not unified and similarly to the Maintenance page, did not convey the Games brand.
The project then evolved into a redesign of other error pages, such as the 404 and 500 pages, each with its own set of illustrations and copy.
