New layout for the blog

too many scan lines!

Un peu de français pour ceux qui sont pas totally fluent comme you my dear Régine ?
Plizzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

is it? i like it, very much ohh soo web 2.0 looking.

Hi Baldi,

in French? c'est marrant que tu me demandes cela. il y a tout juste un an, je voulais faire un blog en français, just une traduction des meilleurs billets du jour. mais tout mon entourage m'a dit "t'es folle? tu vas perdre ton temps, les Français s'en fichent complètement des trucs que tu publies." je suis toujours tentée, mais j'ai plus le temps.

Pas mal ton nouvau design... Par contre, le logo ressort un peu mal, c'est dommage, j'ai toujours adoré ton titre (et les squatteurs commerciaux aussi)

Continue, in french ou en inglés, ta lecture étend mon mode de pensée.

Si tu passes sur Toulouse, par exemple, pour le Printemps de Septembre, je me ferais une joie de te recevoir à l'antenne. Ça fera évoluer les réflexions de ton entourage ...

Woah ... really is very pink.

Bello il nuovo layout però il vecchio era più... "alternativo"? questo è più conforme alle ultime tendenze, no?
Il magenta è figo.
Il doppio menu laterale è sicuramente più funzionale.
Avrei fatto il logo "we make money not" meno scuro, così mi sembra poco leggibile, anche se capisco l'ironia della cosa!

Ciao ciao : )

hi,

i like your blog, but the diagonal lines in the background of the text are making my eyes dance while trying to keep the line.
I would prefer an uni backgrund...

best jochen

Wow, looks nice, but is oh so hard on the eyes (the scanlines) and it gets me really dizzy.

Congratulations, Regine. First comments: Web 2.0ish... I like the new tags. Pink? It's not really that pink. People who say it is don't know what really pink even means.

On the other hand, I think the posts need clearer demarcation from each other and the background. Maybe some other background (white is probably easiest on the eyes). It's even more critical for the comments, as you can see on this page.

ok, everyone. i guess my strategy is not working: the scan lines are meant to hypnotise you, you'd obey the subliminal message they hide and click like mad on the ads to make me rich.

it was so much better before.
i really liked the way the name of the blog was written

it's to much "web 2.0" like. Your site looks like 90% of websites lauch during the last 6 months.
Your last desgn was really original and not so bad.
In changing for this design, you lost your personnality.

Where is the signature we-make-money-not-art? This new lay_out just looks like the http://www.last.fm/user/niilist, the other was more alternative.

il faut pas penser que aux français, il faut penser a touts les francophone, like me.

Either go really Extreme, or don't,
going halfway (or in this case quarterway) is frustrating. To me it looks more amateur and leads away from the essence of this blog - the content eg. your text.
sorry

"politically correct" re-design????...
but congratulations, Regine, for your blog...i love it

i really like your blog and visit it daily. the new design is bäh! it was much better before.. this one is quite boring.

Sometimes it takes a redesign to realise it's not worth changing. My criticisms are : Title almost invisible, text hard to read and very 'safe'. Just doesn't match such a unique site. It's lost its 'femininity', which is very attractive in the boring old nerdy web wide world... Who's for a bring back old site campaign?

The old one looked to me more alternative and showed more personality. This one is definitely web2.0ish but if is that the direction you want to take, in terms of functionality and usability, it has different lacks. In the first one maybe too but in that case it didn't matter ;)

So the question is, do you want it to be a funky blog about art or a web 2.0 portal about technology? Probably the first one would fit more with the content, in my personal opinion.

Credits for the effort by the way!

What's with having the article text smaller and less highlighted than other stuff on the right? This is bad :(

And no "We make money not x" header? That was genius.

Régine, je pourrais bien faire la traduction si tu veux. C'est vrai que je ne commente pas énormément sur ton weblog mais je le suis avec attention.

alas! i asked to get rid of the "We make money not x" header because some people didn't get it and thought the blog was now named just "we make money not". i know, i know ;-)

salut Nuno,

c'est cool de me le proposer. malheureusement, j'ai pas d'argent pour payer un travail de traduction et je suis contre l'idée de faire bosser les gens gratos. par ailleurs, la raison pour laquelle je voulais bloguer en français c'est que le contact avec ma langue maternelle me manque beaucoup. plus le temps passe plus je trouve que le français est une langue magnifique. ce qui ne signifie pas que mes billets en français lui rendraient justice!

first thanks for your good work on research and bringing
the nicest articles in the web, but the redesign is abit too
trendy, i 'loved the 3d block typo of your logo. it was more french
illustrative & more personal & charming.... maybe you tune up your old one....

ease up on the lines and bring back the title!! x

Actually your strategy DID work: I got hypnotized and I HAD TO click on the ads: so you're rich now Regine!
By the way: congrats for your new blog-style: you made a good work and I'm sure you're gonna make it funkyer while you keep on working on it.
Anyway yours is one of the best content source on the web: please keep on doing and make me happy.
your reader fooosco

the background looks a little zeitgeisty, doen't it?

and it definitly reduces legiability, which is bad seeing that your site has a lot of text information.

i used adblock to deactivate the background.

Me encanta Regine!
Es eficaz, original y editorialmente organizado.
Felicitaciones!!
JG

hum, why did you have to change it at all?
I liked the old style because it was more personal.
Unfortunately I also have say that the lines in the backgrund make it difficult to read. And: the impression is so ordinary now, pink as the new fashion color, the clean font, the big ad coloumns on the right side. All the charming aspect is gone... wheres this lovely website gone?

why don't you start a competition for a new template ? You can always use the winning design and advertise its creator on your site . That way everybody wins, since you let your readers give feedback on how your blog should or would or can be, and the winner gets free advertisement!

Compliments Max, congrats Régine.
Opposed to others I am quiete comfortable with the redesign. I like the stripes (still clicking like mad ;) ) even so this might be a problem depending on the monitor one owns. The only slight critic would be the nearby invisible "we make money not". My first impression was "That´s not a blog anymore, it´s a magazine" and that in fact you are.

Best
pK

not a big fan of the new 3D-ish "buttons". thought it was much nicer with flat text. now it just kinda looks like every other standard blog.

contents still good. i guess that's what's important.

Oh dear! The site lost its visual personality, the scan lines want me to adjust the display.

But I'm using the Feedreader anyway. ;-)

I don't want to be rude because I love this blog, so it's in utmost repect that I have to say WTF? Please don't leave it looking like this.

If you would like any input I'd be thrilled to offer my two cents, and if not I'm okay with that too, I'll still leave your site as my homepage.

Peace,

Mike

Another vote for getting rid of the diagonal lines in the background. Hurts my eyes on this laptop screen and makes it very hard to read the text. I prefer the older font too (I'm using windows at present).

Don't really see why the tags need to pretend to be buttons either (with those ubiquitous web2.0 gradients)... adds quite a lot to the clutter.

Bonne chance!

Sorry, I liked the old header better. This new site is a little too web 2.0. If this is an art website it shoudn't fit in with the format of the other 1001 blogs out there.
Just my 2 cents

i'm not a fan of the new design, and I'm only posting this comment because I AM a huge fan of this site.

old header -- great.
new buttons, diagonal lines -- not so good.

the 2.0 look is lame.
c,

Glad to see a new layout, but I will keep RSSing the content. These diagonal lines in the background are interesting, but not helpful. Make it readable, not art.

Everything else seems dead on. Good work.

I don't really want to tell you how I think things should look, but there are a couple copy-editor style comments that might help things out a bit.

I tried playing around with my scroll to figure out what people were talking about with the diagonal lines. It seems like you have them being laid out statically, relative to content on the page. If I scroll up and down, it's possible that the lines shift position on my screen, so they flicker back and forth, which makes a subtle strobing effect. I think that's what people are complaining about. One possible fix would be to layout the lines as a static background which doesn't move when you scroll. (like all those cheesy webpages from back in the day) The only possible problem here is that the pattern bordering content on the page may strobe relative to the content. Not sure if that's a better alternative.

Maybe it would be easier on the eyes to box the text with a flat white background? This may also eliminate the strobing relative to content if you make the background not scroll as mentioned above.

And a slight thing I noticed. With the tags in the boxes on some of the posts, the tags will run to a second line and start overlapping the top row of tags. Not sure whether this was intentional, but it looks like it might not be.

I don't remember if the featured articles and recent interviews sections were there before, but they're really nice. I realized I had missed the earlier sumo wrestler piece thanks to them.

hola dear readers,
thanks so much for the feedbacks, they are much much appreciated (even the cruel ones ;-)
we'll sort out the diagonal lines and make them less intrusive, but i quite like the buttons so you'll have to campaign harder to have them removed! call me egomaniac but i also like the idea that the "we make money not" is nearly invisible, gives that "hey we all know where we are" feeling.

It was so original before. Now it's bland and boring and hard to read and poor color choice!

I must write first that I am hooked on your site I read it all the time and keep track of you wounderfull updating, but the new design is not adding much, I like it as it was before, simple. Adam a fan from Israel

ditto on everyone who said this is too web 2.0. The original design was more original with the tight line height and spacing. And these colors, scanlines and buttons are so typically flickr-esque that the site looks the same as the thousands of other startup blogs out there.

Please change it back
It just looks like an ordinary blog, like many others now.
Liked it way more before.
I am a designer, and believe me, from a design point it looked way more interesting and engaging before.

change it back or give it another try

sorry

I also prefer the old look. (Sorry!) The white background was easier to read.

I don't know what prompted this "updated" layout, but its very dissapointing. I loved the old layout along with the colors and the whole design in general. This layout really isnt very original or that great to look at...honestly. I use to visit the site just to look at the layout and pictures, it was so clean and simple. Very dissapointing to see this change. especially the top header WTF is that? Anyways A for effort, im a fan i really am thats why this sucks to see a change like this. :(

ps. You can see how much the old layout inspired my own site.

I sure like this layout :D

I like your color...but the simplistic use of text for your categories was so much nicer than the buttons...there was something punk rock and mysterious about the previous layout...this is too corporate or expected for a blog...come back my sweet regine...we love you

I quite like the layout. But i have to agree on the header missing being a bad thing.

Why don't you put it back into this design?
The argument that people did not 'get' the logo is not that strong. Most people i showed your site to immediately made the connection between the logo and the tag-cloud. So I bet the people that don't get your old logo are either computer-illiterates or they haven't looked at it well enough.

I'll be happy to help you out if you need it!

OMG! i had no idea everyone liked the old look so much. i was so sick of it. there's no way i'm going to bring back a layout that made me cringe. we solved the diagonal lines though. still trying to twitch everything a bit.

je preferais aussi l'ancien design... mais je comprends que tu puisse en etre fatiguée et qu'un peu de changement ne fait pas de mal ... mais c'est vrai que là ca fait un peu trop web 2.0 et ta typo manuscrite de we make money not art etait vraiment tres bien ... sinon je rejoins tous les francophones...un " on fait des thunes pas de l'art "serait génial car quelque fois je ne prends pas le temps de lire ces gros paragraphes de techniques qui m'interessent tellement .

The old design was much better. I can understand you not wanting to go to the old design, though. My main issues with the current design are that I don't like how the tag cloud is set up (I liked the tag cloud that had different sizes for the text rather than limiting all of the tags to a regimented rectangle. The other is that there is no clear border between the background and the post boxes... it just makes it look unbalanced and also hard to read. I think there should be a great contrast between the background and the post boxes. The headline is a little too much web 2.0 as other people have said... it makes it no longer look like a site that was custom built for you, just kinda mimicks a blogger template that was skinned.

This is my favorite site to read by far (and I look at around 200-500 sites a day for the kind of work I do), so I do enjoy and look up to the site an awful lot.

please take a look:

http://www.sexblo.gs/

best regards

Scan-lined white framed light purple-pink is SO hot right now!
No, seriousy: Very user-friendly and up-to-date design, but somehow not as personal as the old layout and it looks a bit crowded in 1024x768. Anyway you definitely deserve a big hug for this improvement.
Keep enlightening us! ;-)

I liked the old design better as well, but as several other readers said, I can understand your being sick of it!

I quite liked the old header, though I didn't know you had cut off the "art". I just assumed I couldn't see it because of a glitch on my browser's part.

I will have to say that I liked the freedom and open-ness of the old layout.

But... if you are going to stick to this layout, there is one big issue that is really bugging me and I think is a legitamite issue.

The fact that links are simply delineated by bold text is really not a good idea. It's hard to differentiate links and normal bold words, and it forces the user to roll the mouse over every bold word to check if it's a link.

If you want some evidence backing up the usability of it, there is always Jakob Nielson: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20040510.html

Don't take him too seriously, but that is my main gripe. At least make them a different color.

hi hui,

funny you mention sexblo.gs, i asked max to "copy" its layout because i loved it and he's the one who designed it. sexblo.gs is his blog ;-)

cheers,

r

be original web2 layouts is in every blog (is standar gradient and bevel photoshop styles the future of web design???)...

its something like the first days of the www when everyone was design web sites with a 100+ gifs inside ...

Though this design isn't that original (does it need to be?), i like it for the simple fact is clear and clean. I hardly visited the old site, i read most posts via rss. But anyway, there's more structure now (or it appears to be more)
Btw, i like the buttons too :p

can you please change it back :( I use to love to look at the site...it looks horrible now :(

ouch! - this hurts my eyes! - quite liked the old style sorry.

Content still as good as ever though!