Redesigning popular websites and applications, giving them a fresh twist of design and usability is a hobby of mine. Recently, I decided to redesign Wikipedia, with the idea of making it more fresh, readable and usable across devices.

P.S Please watch the below demo with HD mode enabled, for some reason, I could not get the original resolution to play by default.

After a brief brainstorm on what changes I wanted to make to the widely popular site, I came up with a few themes and features to drive the design process.

Themes:

• A minimalist, predominantly black and white theme for the site.
• Less use of lines and borders. Emphasize the layout with use of white space, grids and shadows instead.
• Colors for links and different types of articles.

Features:

• Display the approximate read time of an article.
• Allow users to easily increase/decrease text size.
• A Read Mode that allows the user to consume information undisturbed by hiding all other controls.
• A Night Mode that inverts the color scheme for for comfortable reading in dimmed settings.

Next, I made some wireframes of the layout on Balsamiq.

After, I plugged in my headphones, brewed a strong cup of coffee and sat down with Adobe Xd to prototype these.

Here are the screens:

Let me know your opinions/suggestions in the comments below. Happy designing!