Digg.com is a unique news source where the readers, rather than editors, get to pick what appears on the website. The basic premise is that anyone can submit stories they've found on the web and their peers get to "digg" those stories they approve of. Once a story gets enough diggs, it goes to the homepage where thousands of diggers will read it daily.

In June 2005, Digg founder Kevin Rose contacted silverorange to work on the interface for the site. The original interface had been hastily pieced together by programmers during the hurricane of coding while the site was being pieced together, altered, and added to. The site functioned really well and was beginning to gain in popularity, but many first-time visitors were confused about how the site worked and were intimidated by the utilitarian aesthetic.

The first thing we did with Digg was to address how the content was organized on the main pages of the site. We deconstructed the components that made up a news story and determined what was most important and how to enable visitors to access those things most easily. For example, the concept of "digging" was clearly the most unique aspect of the stories, so we tried different formatting treatments to bring that information to the fore.

This restructuring process was followed by the development of a unique identity and appearance for the site. The key was to balance the great functionality and power of the system that had been built with a design that both let the content speak for itself and that welcomed new visitors.

The success of the project was reflected by a happy client and, more importantly, a rise in new user registrations following the launch of the new site. Since the initial launch, silverorange has been working with Digg on new features and on refining older ones and the site continues to grow at a phenomenal rate.