Techmeme redesign
techmeme.comIt looks terrible - almost like something I'd come up with.
The main points for me are:
- The fonts for starters just don't look good. I'd re-visit that.
- The skinny horizontal menu
- The "More" links below each article summary need work. Its a little overwhelming and just runs on from the text.
I should note that I don't recall what it looked like pre-redesign.
Some ideas:
- As others have said, the font.
- I get the whole "look like the front page of a real newspaper" vibe, but I think the contrast needs to be adjusted.
- I feel like my eyes don't know where to look first. That's most likely foremost a contrast problem, but there's probably some other tweaks that need to be done.
- The shape of your logo clashes with the implicit and explicit horizontal lines on the site. I don't know how to fix this short of getting rid of the jump in the logo.
- The font on the nav bar is too thin for the very heavy background color. The result is that every link on the nav bar looks blurry... as if the background color is bleeding into the font glyphs.
- The article meta-data takes up WAY too much vertical space. The chief offender seems to be the tweets list. I'd change this to one line. You already have an expander widget, so this wouldn't be too terrible on usability. To emphasize how many tweets there are, why not do a sparkline or "...and 47 others" at the end of the tweet line?
- Get rid of the "newest" column. Put it below the fold under "Who's hiring in tech". You might also steal Reddit's idea of having a box up top where you have the newest stories on rotation.
This is a huge opportunity for something else to replace them.
It's simply terrible. Really disappointed. I usually scan the site 3x5 times a day.
- functions more like a blog than an aggregate.
- emphasizes sponsors and sharing over the actual headlines.
- prominent sponsor section forces more headlines below the fold, only one or two relevant articles are displayed as a result.
- Newest headlines look like and are placed like Adwords.
- Newest headlines are squeezed so narrow it takes 6 lines of text to say 2 lines worth of information.
- barely any contrast between content and links so the content is now part of the "clutter" they sought to avoid.
- I just blocked(!) Sponsors and Hiring from the page, leaving a big white hole between the content and Newest.
There is something wrong with it. I can't really describe what though. I think the best designed news site out there right now is The Verge, but I'm sure there are other examples of what is right.
It's too white. It feels like it didn't load completely. Newest is narrow. 7 headlines take up 50 lines.
If you don't have Optima (the font), it defaults to Trebuchet, which I find very ugly. Could they not have used one of many available webfonts (from Typekit/FontSquirrel/Google etc.)?
And seriously, why not a responsive design instead of having 3 different versions of the same site (normal, mobile, mini)?
Checkout Twitter Bootstrap 2 (uut next week) or Foundation. It will make your live so much easier, and the site will be a lot more readable.
http://www.markdotto.com/2012/01/24/bootstrap-2-ready-for-te...
and
Hey Gabe, sorry to talk smack man.
Since it looks like you want to keep it simple and easy; for max compatibility, try just sans-serif. Sans-serif is Helvetica on a Mac, and Arial on a PC. Optima looks really bad at that small a font size, not to mention it looks terrible on a Mac (all smudged). Optima is not designed to be a web/display font.
I have neither, hurrah!
As for the site, why is the JavaScript and CSS inline? Makes for pretty lousy caching...
Being such an influential product for the "tech scene" (I've never really seen its benefit over visiting only a couple of blogs, they all cross-link anyway, but I digress), surely there'd be lines of highly talented young designers queuing to get the opportunity to redesign Techmeme for free?
I know sites have to make money, but the sponsored area detracts massively from the main stories and is the main area of focus, the page doesn't scale well at all, the font's too small and the characters are too close together.
In a world where The Verge and TechCrunch will cover (I'm guessing) 80% of the stories featured on there, there has to be something compelling to get people scanning, and I don't think this redesign is it.
Why the hellish font?
My first impression of this site is that the hyperlink to information ration is way too high.
Articles has less screen real-estate (because of 3 columns) and it seems like more work to just scroll through and read the headlines. I'm sure it will grow on me but not a huge fan at the moment.
I primarily use /river and I can say I definitely do not like it. It's not easy to glance at and scan also the emphasis seems to be on the Journalist and Media outlet not the story.
It's...dense.
body { line-height: 1.5; color: #333 }
Does anyone still use TechMeme? I never actually used it, but I thought it had mostly faded away by now?
The ultimate echo chamber is still alive and well, mostly because it aims to flatter a small group of loud "influencers". Reasonably effective marketing strategy in that sense.
I still do, it's a very nifty site to get an objective feel of tech news. The redesign however is not a very pleasant one, especially the font.
I haven't found it objective in a while. It's mostly AppleMeme these days.
That's probably because they have started featuring M G Seigler's articles a lot. And as we know, he's an ardent Apple fan.
It was good some time ago but ever since the rumors of iPad started coming out every second headline has been about apple. The other half is about google, twitter or facebook. No diversity at all.
I don't think it uses the golden ratio, except for the 2nd column maybe. It seems a little distracting.
very prominent on the sponsored posts.
3 column layouts never really work for me.
Not an improvement. Whoever designed that needs help on the design side of things.
The sponsored posts section disrupts the site and wastes massive space by utilizing only the top fraction, but requiring about 1/3 the width.
The site should be doing a radically better job at sub sets of data by this point. The tabs should be used for that. Instead there's a pointless "About" tab up there - so if I visit Techmeme 100 times, how many times do I need that tab?