- Posts tagged : Web Design
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Why I Hate Salon's New Design
Salon.com unveiled a new design last week. I hate it.
I'm sure that least part of my dislike stems from the fact that I was the first Webmaster at Salon.com way back in the early days of the Web when we had the audacity to think we could not only create the margazine on Macs but serve it up Apple-style as well. We actually housed the servers in our offices near what was to become Pac Bell Park in downtown San Francisco. Mignon Khargie, one of the brightest designers and nicest people I've ever worked with, was the graphic genius behind a pretty avant-garde design.
The new design is pretentious and loud. It's bold for sure but its boldness transcends utility. It's too self-congratulatory by half. You know those movies where it's painfully obvious the director was far more interested in showing off for his fellow artists than in creating a film you, a member of the great unwashed untrained in the fine points of cinema, would enjoy? Or those novels where the finely turned phrases are so clever and witty that they are content-free and puzzling? The new Salon.com design is like that to me.
On my large monitor, when I open a page on Salon.com, I don't even get to read the entire headline of the piece I'm about to read without scrolling. That's in part because the name "SALON" is so huge that it pushes and crowds the stuff I came there to read down "below the fold" as it's called. I find that annoying.
I'm not a designer. I probably don't have any right to an opinion on this esoteric subject. But can I just say as someone who's followed Salon from the very first issue and remains a great fan of much (but certainly not all) of its writing, that the new design sucks?
Don't Waste Your Time on This Slide Show
I usually find much of what the SocialMediadd folks offer to be of some reasonable value, sometimes even really useful.
That's not the case for this slide show that purports to explain 13 things to factor into your website redesign. It's actually a bunch of thin statistics that end up offering very little actionable advice. Don't bother wasting the significant amount of time it takes just to read this extended Hubspot commercial.
That's not the case for this slide show that purports to explain 13 things to factor into your website redesign. It's actually a bunch of thin statistics that end up offering very little actionable advice. Don't bother wasting the significant amount of time it takes just to read this extended Hubspot commercial.
