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Welcome to AnandTech's 2013 Redesignby Anand Lal Shimpi on 3/9/2013 1:16 PM EST
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ChronoReverse - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkI don't want to be the guy but are there optimizations for a widescreen? It seems to be a severe omission to not have buttons right there to change text size and column widths.
An inverse colour scheme would be nice for those with AMOLED screens too. Reply
tviceman - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkI have to agree. With virtually every screen device being 16:9 or 16:10, it doesn't make sense to have so much of the left and right side of the screen wasted with blank space. Reply
prismatics - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkDo you guys even look at other websites? Having content spread all the way across the screen is not useful. Try reading a long article with lines that stretch from edge to edge. You have to read with your whole head and neck instead of just moving your eyes. Reply
ChronoReverse - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkI didn't say fill the widescreen for a reason. I just want to expand a bit (like how Techreport's site has the option) and adjustable fonts (found in many news sites).
Seems reasonable with both widescreens and high resolution screens. Reply
Jedi2155 - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 - linkFixed width really bugs me for some reason, since I usually have browser maximize on my 2560x1440 and rarely have two side by side. I wish there was a way to change the default layout based on your log in settings. A "skins" style feature so to speak. Reply
MonkeyPaw - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkYeah, eventually, you must cutoff the width. The site looks perfect in landscape mode on my TF700T. The last design didn't quite fit. Reply
CeriseCogburn - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkI've got no complaint on width, but the new boxes and no boxes crud, and the SICK microsoft clone sad pastel colors is total suck and epic fail.
Why do these idiots do this crap every year or twice a year.
It appears they are all brain washed wimps at the mercy of the "industry standard" makeover.
Nothing could be less useful and more disruptive and pathetic. Reply
uc404s - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkYou could at the very least make an attempt at politeness when voicing your concerns. Name calling is not helpful. Reply
CeriseCogburn - Saturday, March 23, 2013 - linkIt's not meant to be helpful dummy. It's meant to HURT for the arch stupidity at play. Reply
N4g4rok - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkGood god, man. It's just a site redesign. There is absolutely no reason for you to be so rude. Nobody cares if you don't like it because no one is asking you to. Throwing a tantrum over it just comes off as obnoxious. Reply
xaml - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkThis user is notorious on here, maybe in addition to layout changes, which are nice by the way, there should be minimal comment moderation. Reply
Sabresiberian - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkFrankly I think most sites would improve themselves by doing more than minimal moderation. It's all good to try to have an open mind and allow for the widest possible readership, but some people just need to be told they are inappropriate in a stronger way.
The site looks nice to me. I'll have to live with it awhile to make any more constructive comments, but judging from what I see I expect no problems. Reply
CeriseCogburn - Saturday, March 23, 2013 - linkYou mean notoriously correct, AS THE 46 PAGES OF COMPLAINTS HAVE REVEALED, YOU IDIOT. Reply
THizzle7XU - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkWow, does the site redesign keep you up at night? Get a life. It's a website.
Great redesign Anand! Looks cool. Reply
PreOmegaZero - Monday, March 11, 2013 - link"Epic Fail" is Epic Old. Time to get out a dictionary newer than 2011. Reply
CeriseCogburn - Saturday, March 23, 2013 - linkAll of you bitched at what you didn't like too, HYPOCRITE IDIOTS. Reply
BWMerlin - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkAnother vote here for widescreen support. The first thing I noticed about the new redesign is that there is so much wasted space, surely the articles on the front page can be three wide instead of the current two wide as it would allow you to show more articles and help reduce the large amount of white space. Reply
CaedenV - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkAbsolutely wrong!
Having full width pages makes for horrible reading, and woeful multi-tasking. I very much appreciate web pages that allow me to have 2 pages displayed properly side by side on a monitor that is 1920px wide. It allows me to snap my browser to 1/2 screen and have what I am waiting on, watching, or referencing open on the same window. Reply
MagicBoyUK - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 - linkIt's a question of taste. You don't have to use it, but some readers would appreciate it. I for one spend most of my time in full screen view in Safari. Reply
random2 - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkYeah, not a big fan of reading wide swaths of 11 point text, or using my 24" monitors 1920X1200 screen for one website. Like many people I like having a few things open. Standard width websites are easier to manage and read...at least for me. Maybe when I am a crazy power user with three 27 or 30 inch monitors, but this 24" badboy is as much real estate as my little brain can handle at the moment. Reply
jjcrandall - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - link+1 Wide screen optimization and inverse color scheme please. Reply
Jambe - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - link+2, although I don't necessarily prefer inverse, just less in-your-face brightness. Making the site less eyestrain-inducing is more important to me than making it stretch to fill wide screens, too. Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkSo the previous site design featured black text on a white background, the differences being that this redesign uses white as the main background color as well (the margins are white instead of blue) and comments are over a white background vs. light blue.
Do you believe the eyestrain is caused by the white margin color or the comment background color, or both?
Do any of these options make it any better?
Take care,
Anand Reply
RSDeuce - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkAnand, I can see you posted that response to almost everyone complaining about the white, and almost none (or actually none?) of them responded.
I agree that the white is a bit glaring. I think that any one of those greys would tone it down.
If you could, select the "Load all comments" button and scroll down. Those comments are just sparse text on a pure white background. Anything to break that up would be great. Maybe it is the font or something, because I read e-books all the time on this same laptop but the white really jumps out at you on the new page.
Thanks for caring enough to comment back all over this thread. Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkI just posted the comments so I suspect responses will come over time. I held off on responding early on because I wanted to get a good feel for the overall concerns so that we can start going through and addressing big groups.
Is your complaint primarily about comment background or the site background color as well (margin color I guess)?
Take care,
Anand Reply
EBH - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkI like the grey the most. Reply
hrrmph - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkI'm using FireFox 19 and Chrome 25, both with default settings. The results are much the same - unfortunately, not particularly good.
My desktop monitor is 27" 2560 x 1440 with a custom dpi setting of 130% normal (125 dpi) on WinXP. Font size set to Normal. Viewing distance is 20". I use PCMag's WinSizeMe to display two windows side-by-side as my 'normal' viewing mode. Having two windows open side-by-side approximates looking at an open book.
I didn't check my notebook on Win7 yet.
Dark gray margins gives me the least eyestrain.
Monitors are brighter than book paper, so having a lot of white on the screen can give it a glaring appearance.
For each AT webpage that I have open, I'm getting 3 cm white space on each of the left and right margins on Firefox. It makes it look a lot like a page in a book.
Other than glare, another problem with this, in my opinion, is that the resolution of desktop monitors is nowhere near retina. So to get a decently readable display, the font size needs to be more. To get the font size up, that space has to come from somewhere. So typically on other websites the webpages are designed with less margin (rightly so) and much of the margin is actually used for displaying the main content, and isn't used for margin at all.
The new AT website goes in the opposite direction by providing a generous margin. But, the tradeoff is that the font sizes are much reduced. For example, on the homepage, the headlines for the older Pipeline articles are shown in a font that is unbearably small.
The Metro-ish hard square corners add to the jarring effect. I find this on all things Metro-ish on the desktop. I understand that in the mobile space that hard square corners save space, but it hurts the appearance on the desktop.
Someday we're going to think of all this Modern nonsense the way that mainstream interior decorators look at all black and white home interiors - nice for photographing in a magazine and making a "statement." But, in the end: not very comforting and not very practical to live with.
A general observation is that as we all get more interested in mobile, the desktop display experience is becoming degraded. For example, AVG Free with their wannabe Metro look now has a display that looks just awful. It has hard-square corners, blown out font sizes, and cut-off warning messages, such that you cannot understand what they might be warning you about. So it looks like as various folks try to get Modern... were going to have turbulence ahead.
Clearly in web publishing and applications development there is natural pressure to keep up and not get left behind. We all feel it - even just as users.
But, sometimes its good to ask what is better about the new?
After years of using Vista and Win7 at work, I'm still on XP at home, although I allowed Win7 on my ultra-book to take advantage of the 10GB of RAM that it can hold.
Luddite? Not really... I use Android and am getting along with it reasonably well. I have BB10 arriving tomorrow and am eagerly looking forward to learning a 'serious' mobile OS that can run both BB and Android apps. So I'm open to change. I get it that the world needs to move forward. But, at each step I ask "forward to what?" And more importantly, I ask "at what overall cost?"
I work fastest on XP. Less than 5% of what was changed in Vista makes me faster and less than 5% of what's in Win7 makes me faster at getting things done. That would be an improvement, except that 50% of whats new in Vista and Win7 slows me down far more than anything that I'm gaining. Whats more, I own sufficient licenses to all of those to test any operating system that I want.
Many times I wonder if what I really want on the desktop is Windows XP with 128GB of RAM. Hmmm... WinServer 2003 Enterprise on the desktop with a Broadwell CPU and said RAM... that might eventually do it.
Coming back down to Earth, I'm afraid that this is just a repeat of video trying to kill the radio star here. But, I'm not buying it until I see a productivity improvement.
As for the AT site... I rarely use Chrome, so I just went into advanced properties and set it to display at 125%. I guess I'll be using Chrome as my dedicated browser for reading AT. Primarily to get the font sizes cranked up.
Hopefully it goes better on Win 7 on the ultrabook.
Still my all time favorite tech site. The content is what really counts.
- Reply
Tegeril - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkI read all of this, and it was quite ramble-y...but please don't increase the font size. Browser scaling exists for a reason. It's already 14px in the comments section.
Now a slightly higher contrast division between comments (currently it's light grey on ever so slightly lighter grey background) would be good :) Reply
hrrmph - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkHa... you are kind to only call it ramble-y.
I just checked it on Firefox on the Nexus 7 3G-Data... it looks beautiful. No wasted space anywhere, its mostly legible, and pinch to zoom gives you any font size you want. Chrome is almost as good, but fonts are a bit tinier.
The site looks good on the Samsung Galaxy Note 2 using the default browser. Fonts are small, but readable and again, pinch and zoom gets you whatever size you want fairly easily.
The desktop hi-rez monitor and WinXP isn't scaling properly at all. If I let a window occupy the whole screen, then there's tons of wasted space on the left and right - like books-full-o-wasted space. Could be me using too high a rez monitor for XP.
The font size in the comments section is fine... its that bloody Pipeline font size that grates the most.
Just checked it on the Asus Ultrabook with 1920 x 1080 display and IE9... uh oh, horrible. Worse than the desktop (in side-by-side viewing mode). Heaps of wasted space on the borders.
I have a pretty good idea how hard the folks at AT work, and unlike others I'm not about to call them anything less than brilliant, but something's not right here. Its kinda like Win8 booting into Metro and the Desktop mode not having the Start Button and Start Menu. Someday we may understand why it was necessary too do this. But at the moment it seems like our desktops have been left in early sandbox status.
Too much pandering to mobile and too much sacrifice on the desktop. I know it has to be done to get mobile right, but while you're doing it, please don't leave behind the high rez large displays on the desktop or notebooks behind.
Or maybe its just Windows users...?
- Reply
vFunct - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkDefinitely keep it white. It's the standard background for typography, and every site is converging on a full-white background with black text. There is no better combination, and it pretty much defines good design. The last thing you want is off colors and multiple shadings. Gradients are the worst, and a definite no-no in modern design. You may want to think about turning more items into black-and-white and remove the coloring.
Also design is converging on big-pictures and big fonts.
Some sexy examples:
http://www.vogue.fr Reply
etamin - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkI can see why you like the "whiteout" styles you gave examples to, but all those sites are photo-centric as opposed to AnandTech's reading-centric material. For this reason, I think dark gray borders suits AT the best. Reply
1d107 - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkI don't think that garish fashion design principles should apply to a technical site, where people come to read as opposed to admire bling.
Similarly, if you go to a bookstore, a small section will be assigned design books full of fancy fonts printed on shiny paper. Other, much large sections, where both fiction and technical books are, will be filled with more practical matte paper full of neat black text. The books will be printed in portrait and there will be only a small amount of white field outside the text. This is how people READ, and it is pretty much the established standard which survived many centuries and many generations, because it is practical.
Unfortunately, it is very difficult these days to find a computer screen that is suitable for reading. Most of them have 16:9 aspect ratio and fixed orientation. Even if they can be rotated, they become too tall and too narrow for comfortable reading. There is very little that can be done to this. Maybe, maybe, Google eventually will overcome this and we'll have more 3:2 screens to enjoy.
For now, until that option exists, it seems practical to lay the text either in multiple columns or in one column that is not too wide. However, for ease of reading, the white fields on the sides of the text should be relatively small, and the rest of unused -- or used for secondary text -- a neutral monochrome that is noticeably darker.
Anand, it would be nice to have an option for the black main a rticle text. The grayish text is OK on retina iPad, but it gives me a headache on a more traditional 96DPI monitor. Thanks. Reply
colonelpepper - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linktrendy... feels very modern... cool but meh Reply
kenthaman - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 - linkHey Anand,
Love the new look! As article categories have expanded it has become increasingly necessary for this re-haul and I for one like it; however, I do agree with some of the above posts. The white margins are definitely causing increased eye strain (relative to the old format). Of the three color options you posted, I think the lighter-grey was the best. Grey seemed a little too dark and really-light didn't seem like much of an improvement over white.
I agree that it will take a little time to point out any major issues, but overall things are looking great!
Keep up the good work!
Ken Reply
ChronoReverse - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkHi Anand. The darker grey bars on the sides really do reduce the glare considerably for me and focuses my attention on the content better. I believe others have suggested a slight grey for the content background as well to subtly reduce the brightness. Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkWhat about this as an option: http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/reallyfreakinl... ?
Take care,
Anand Reply
ChronoReverse - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkHmm, it's better than sheer white but the darkest grey is easier on the eyes still. I would also consider a pattern (perhaps like the one in the header where the Anandtech logo and ad resides). Reply
ssj4Gogeta - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - link+1 for the darkest grey option. Looks much more welcoming. Also, perhaps the comments could have the "reallyfreakinlight" background. Reply
Bonesdad - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkHave to agree, the grey is much easier on the eyes. Esp when I get up on the morning...having the bright white bore into my brain through my eyeballs is ... uncomfortable. But as others have said, it's the content that counts. Reply
jjcrandall - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkmaybe a selection button at the top of the site or a quick gradient scale to select your level of grey on the borders would be nice. it could be stored as a cookie as well. Some really like white, and some like darker colors... Reply
This Guy - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkLight grey makes this site look like Ars Technia. While a great site with a few excellent writters, they are no AnandTech.
I had no problem with the last blue backgound. From my understanding blue has been part of AnandTech's style for most of your history. Unless your advertisers are asking for it, why grey?
If you really want the sparse whitespace look, why not adjust your white to be more grey and use a slightly larger font size? Reply
epoon2 - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkI disagree with wide screen optimization. the use cases are mostly: 2-3 windows side by side, with articles being read vertically. I don't even know how to do horizontal scrolling on keyboard.
Now, I can see people using Surface or similar tablets say something different, but that's a specific use case. Reply
prismatics - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkI hope that Anand et al. continue down the path they've chosen instead of heeding the complaints of people who are reacting negatively to change. As has been pointed out, this is definitely a step forward, and in line with best standards for readability. Give people some time before making changes. You hired a designer for a reason, hopefully because you trust that they are competent. My own opinion, as a designer and developer, is that this is great. Sure, user input is important, but don't be too hasty in switching the background color just because a few of thousands of readers complained. Reply
1d107 - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkNo, this is not great.
It may be nice to look at for a second or two, but it is hard to read more than trivial amount of text, period. It is also hard to comprehend, as in many "modern" designs, what that news tile is about, because it has a large, frequently irrelevant picture and a small amount of gray text. much smaller than it used to be. And I am looking not only at Windows 8 modern apps, but at sites like Extremetech on iPad. If this is all that the designers can come up with, and the dare to call it a standard, then I say, to hell with that "standard", I need something that is easier to glance at at the front page, and then easy to read, if it attracts my interest. Bling and white desert are not welcome. Reply
agent_x007 - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkI only want to say two things :
1) Hi everyone :)
2) To Anand : PLEASE make it Blue again !
Example (Paint is great at keeping things easy) : http://img442.imageshack.us/img442/4408/blueat.png Reply
shriganesh - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkYuk! That blue sucks!! Reply
frewster - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkBoth of these help, but it would be even better to do something similar to Arstechnica and invert the entire site if possible. It may not seem like that big of a deal, but the difference for me in eyestrain between the two is immense. Reply
JaredC01 - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkThe really light grey would be fine with a simple pattern overlay to break up the monotony a bit... That my opinion of course.
Regular grey would be okay too, but would darken the whole page quite a bit. Reply
Tyranny42 - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkHi Anand, the last one is the one I prefer as the current one draws my attention to fact that there is nothing there but an empty white space. Reply
Peanutsrevenge - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkThe darkest looks great.
An option would be great for people to set their desired level, which I'm sure could be done through CSS, but my knowledge in that area is poor @ best.
It is too bright though IMO as the mega articles are often read well into the night with several cups of tea to help me through.
Good luck with it though and I'm hoping the comments section has had some much needed attention (able to read own comments and replies to own comments without having to use 'find on page'. Reply
N4g4rok - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkPersonally, i like the park gray. Reply
N4g4rok - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkDark*
My mistake. It's much easier on the eyes. I like how it matches the gray used in the pipeline section too. Somehow makes it seems a lot less cluttered in comparison to the 'lightergrey' image. Reply
kureshii - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkThe comment background colour definitely. The contrast between the text and background is way too steep. Many sites have noticed this and stopped using #000 for text already, and using a light gray background would definitely help that more.
This is a problem I notice on many other sites with #fff background (e.g. NYT). While vFunct has pointed out some sites below that look brilliant with white background, it is notable that none of them are text-heavy. Clicking into the articles shows me the same readability issues with too much contrast.
The dark gray margin definitely helps too. It is kind of ironic that one consequence of the sharper, brighter displays we are getting these days is lower readability on sites that used to pose no such problem. Reply
1d107 - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkText contrast depends on screen quality. The contrast may be too high on a retina display, but it certainly is never enough on a most common laptop or even on a better quality monitor with an older 96 DPI panel. If the contrast is too high, I recommend turning the brightness down, when not gaming. Reply
kureshii - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkAmusingly enough, my U2410 (96 DPI) was already on the zero brightness setting as I typed that. Reply
jjcrandall - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkThose all look good. I don't have a problem with the white backdrop, but an inverse (black or grey) as an option would be nice.
The grey option seems to make you eyes focus to the center of the page, where the white makes it look like there's space that needs to be filled with something. Engadget does the white background, and it takes a while to get use to, its okay, but it appears (at least to me) that a darker than while gradient like arstechnica or techreport appear better. Reply
Exodite - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkPersonally I find that going with a Light Grey or Grey as main color makes it far less glaring.
That said I also agree with the comments regarding the text fields in the comment section needing better separation. Right now it feels a bit wall-of-text-ish.
As for the redesign in general I'll refrain from giving a final opinion until I've had more time to get used to it. Generally speaking I'm not entirely fond of the pastels, font choices and flat interface elements. It takes many cues from Metro it seems, which is unfortunate for me as I can't stand Metro.
Anyway, as long as the articles come in a nice, date-ordered list rather than going full-on The Verge (which vomits content all over the place) I doubt I'll have significant issues with any graphical design.
The fact that the content is excellent helps, of course. :) Reply
colonelpepper - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linki like grey and lightergrey
nice work on the redesign btw!
best of luck moving forward Reply
colonelpepper - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linklooks great on the tablet btw Reply
JeBuSBrian - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkFor me, none of those are any better. But thanks to the Stylish plugin for Firefox, I could override your new redesign with my own. All except for a few elements you've marked as "!important" in your css. You really shouldn't do that, by the way. Here's how mine looks. It isn't perfect, but it's a lot better on my eyes.
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/7949050/My_AnandTech_2013... Reply
shriganesh - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkOh yeah! I agree. using !important isn't very useful for css tweakers like us :D Reply
Murloc - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linknow it's perfect, it doesn't hurt my eyes anymore. As for the rest of the issues I think people just need to get used to it.
I don't understand all the talk about screen ratios margins etc. it looks fine on my 16:10 screen plus the font is big already and easy to read. If you're really blind you can use CTRL+scroll wheel, the wide margins allow to do this easily. Reply
Ewram - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkI think the lighter grey or grey is better, otherwise the redesign looks great! ...And for the record, even though this is a brand new user, I have been a regular reader since 2004. Reply
cgramer - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkHi, Anand. I love either of the first two (grey or lightergrey). They'd really make it a bit less retina-searing. :-) Otherwise, love the redesign! Reply
genzai - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkthanks for looking in to this. all of those help in my case. I don't mind the all-white design in general but if i am reading off my large 24" monitors in the dark which is pretty often the case it is too bright for comfort. if there can be an option to knock down the white by adding some grey as in the photos you posted it would ease eyestrain in these cases. I have my monitors calibrated for ~200 nits and i rarely feel like its too bright for the content i view. But all this white...
g\ Reply
Omega215D - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkThe redesign with color scheme works quite well on my HTC Rezound but on the desktop it's a little wasteful of real estate. The color I don't mind so much but it does remind me of ExtremeTech. Maybe I will get used to it in time since I was used to looking at the old design for several years.
Oh, and Cerise needs to be banned as that poster seems to troll or incite flamewars. Reply
ezridah - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkThe grey one looks the best IMO. Besides possible eye strain, I think it just breaks up the look better. With white it all just blends together and doesn't look as nice. Reply
ezridah - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkAlso, as RSDeuce mentioned, boxing or seperating the comments somehow would be nice as well. When I first tried to reply, I wasn't sure which reply box to hit. It was easy to figure out, but you get my point. Reply
MagicBoyUK - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 - linkI like the lightergrey. Reply
SkyDiver - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkHi, I am seeing a vast amount of white space on my U2410 24" monitor. It is a bit overwhelming. I don't do those tiny phone screens. Everything these days seems to be optimized for little phone screens (skinny and vertical). Fortunately, I'm not on the go all the time. Unfortunately for me, all sites are optimized for tiny screens. I still want bigger hardware and more POWER!
Any of the gray on the sides would make viewing much easier for me. Since I'm not interested in mobile computers that much and that is where the actions is in tech, I don't spend as much time on tech sites as I used to, so you might want to underweight my opinion. Reply
PsiAmp - Thursday, March 14, 2013 - linkI switched back and forth several times and actually tried to read the page using all 3 choices and the first one is the easiest on my eyes. Reply
Kepe - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkYep I'd also like to see some kind of a darker alternative to the white background. There's too much white on the screen now. Reply
Kepe - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkAlso, does the white have to be completely 255, 255, 255?
See www.muropaketti.com for what I mean. They also have a dark theme for their site, it can be switched from the "Vaihda teemaa" button in the top right part of the page. Reply
SnowCat00 - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkI agree, Ars Technica has the switch between dark and white. Reply
CeriseCogburn - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkYep this place is an eye burner now. Must be idiots doing it. Reply
pixelstuff - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkIf your calibrate your screen color and brightness to your room, white isn't a big deal. Reply
1d107 - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkYes, it is. I routinely turn brightness down, yet too much white on the sides doesn't help reading. It is reading that I come for here, not design. Reply
prismatics - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkI'm not sure what you mean by pointing out muropaketti.com, their alternate stylesheet isn't anywhere close to white. Reply
StormyParis - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkAgreed. Looking at the site right now just fries my eyes. A night mode would be appreciated, though I have the nice little Opera user.css that forces it ^^ Reply
roberta - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - link+1 Re: "An inverse colour scheme would be nice for those with AMOLED screens too"
Also Very Nice for all users (example: the ArsTechnica's SUPERB option to view "Light on Dark")
Regards, :)
Roberta Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkSame question as above - our content area actually hasn't changed, it's always been black text on a white background (at least since the 2010 redesign). Is your complaint about the color of the margins or comment background or both (or something else entirely)?
Do any of these options help in your opinion:
Take care,
Anand Reply
uc404s - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkI like the grey example, but lightergrey is nice too. Slightly darker borders help keep the focus on page content and cut down overall brightness somewhat for those of us using widescreens imho. It looks great in portrait on iPad the way it is of course. Reply
roberta - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkGood Day Anand,
The grey is the best of the three....
But, have u looked at ArsTechnica's SUPERB "Light on Dark" option?
Go to ArsTechnica -> Top Left "Main Menu" => Right side "Site Theme: Light on Dark"
Something along those lines would solve the hard on the retina brightness issues....
Best Regards,
Roberta Reply
PCMerlin - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkOverall, I so much want to like the new design. The layout is great, but I have to agree that the brightness from the white is overpowering. the grey option that you have listed really tones it down a LOT, and I tend to like that one the best of all - something about it keep the eyes on the mid-section of the page, which is where they should be. Reply
franxalot - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkThe grey is great for me Reply
phillyry - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkBut the comments had a light blue box which was not so glaring. Reply
MrX8503 - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkMost websites are built on a 960 grid. Plus most people have multiple browser windows open on a wide screen monitor. Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkA very long time ago (~10ish years ago I think) we offered multiple widths, however since then we've standardized on a single width as it was the advice all designers gave us from the standpoint of making content easy to read. We went a little bit wider on the content area this time, but I think we're pushing the limits as is. There is an upper bound to how wide the content area can be without making content awkward to read imho.
I see your comment about making a marginally wider version available. We can't design our tables/images to that slightly wider version as it would break the site for everyone else. Ultimately that would give you a little more text per line (we're already at 687 px wide for the content area, so we're talking about maybe another 100 px or so) - do you believe that would be a significant improvement to your browsing experience? Are there others that feel the same way?
Take care,
Anand Reply
pixelstuff - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkI would like to see a more responsive design to automatically handle different browser widths, without requiring a completely different url for mobile devices. Lots of example templates out there on SquareSpace, ThemeForest, TemplatMonster, etc.
Also I would like one version of the responsive site to fit within 50% of a 1920 monitor, or a browser set to 960 pixels wide (including the scroll bars).
For a full screen 1920 wide browser I would imagine you could reposition the images into a second column out beside the text, creating 3 columns total. Also possibly position the boxes that hold the Facebook and Twitter feeds into another 4th column. Reply
lmcd - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkEXACTLY. A just-under-960 would be perfect for my use case and many others, I'm sure. Reply
amrs - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 - linkOh yes, 960px wide would be so great but I think it's a minority request. Since I use a tiling window manager it usually means browser gets half the screen.
Other than that I dunno about the new site. I come here for the hard information, not to judge the colors. More podcasts would be welcome too. I'm kinda hoping other podcasts will shape up now that Anandtech has set a new standard. Lots of facts and a minimum of self-promotion. Reply
ChronoReverse - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkIt's a difficult problem for sure. I've been reading a few articles in the new format and with Firefox set to zoom 125%, the width of the content area is actually not too bad. I had set the page back to 100% with the new design so I could see it without distortion. Nonetheless, a switch/slider to increase font size separate from the global zoom would be nice.
A couple other things I've noticed:
(1) Firefox and Chrome have the ability to resize this box I'm typing my comments in. It seems to be overridden in both browsers with the new format. If the box were maybe double the height it wouldn't matter as much but I'd rather be able to resize it.
(2) I might be crazy but is something weird with the CSS and Firefox? For some reason a lot of the fonts in the new format is using the defaults even though I haven't told Firefox to override the fonts. Reply
UltraTech79 - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkLooks great!
When is it going to be finished? Or did my browser not finish loading the front page?
(im saying it looks beta as fuck) Reply
eRosenn - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - link+1 for this.
Also the blue theme was much better. Reply
UltraWide - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkIt is much improved overall, but a bit slow to load.
Please do not use white text with a translucent background over images, it is impossible to read. Reply
mjrpes3 - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkengadget experimented with white text over translucent backgrounds a month of so back, and within a week they were gone. thank god. Reply
3ogdy - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkHopefully, they'll fix this real issue or maybe they'll just give us the option to change the whole theme and use the previous one instead, which was infinitely better. Reply
3ogdy - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkmuch improved? in what section? We're talking about www.anandtech.com, aren't we? Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkPerformance tweaks are coming over the next few days, the first goal was to get the design deployed and tweak as need be. HTML and CSS sizes have both been reduced, any addition to the page load times should be on first load due to the Google Fonts and perhaps due to larger images. We are working to make things faster though.
For white text over images are you referring to the featured review content?
Take care,
Anand Reply
yun - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkwhat about ps4? Reply
Montago - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkI liked the darker design better, because it has less stress to the eyes... but i guess ill get used to this new one.
the new design has some advantages, comments looking better is one of them.
I really like that you havent gone insane like Microsoft and the rest of the gang of Metro'sexuals .. Kudos for that ! Reply
Lonyo - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkYeah, this new design is killing my eyes. Really needs to be toned down...
Also the whole site looks a lot less clear. Feels way too cluttered. Reply
Lonyo - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkAlso the images for the reviews really need to be improved. They look like really really badly downscaled versions of the picture in the article, it looks pretty bad. Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkThat's coming, reviews going forward should have better fp images associated with them.
Take care,
Anand Reply
ssj4Gogeta - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkI agree. The contrast needs to be toned down a bit. Reply
3ogdy - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkThe lower side of the page looks like there was a problem with the background or something - I mean, seriously...a black rectangle on a white background? Seriously, Anandtech? Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkDo any of these options help:
Take care,
Anand Reply
pixelstuff - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkThose complaining about the high contrast should focus more on calibrating their monitor to match the room. There are tens of thousands of web sites with black on white, it's not logical to ask them all to change simply to fix a users unconfigured monitor. Properly configuring the monitor helps with all websites (and other applications) all in one fell swoop.
For those who feel they have to view the monitor in both a well lit room as well as a dark room, get a monitor that supports multiple profiles so you can configure it for the bright room and the dark room.
To Anandtech, there's nothing wrong with the white background. Reply
lukarak - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkGrey is the best for me but it is too similar to the pipeline box. The next one is a better match Reply
3ogdy - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkYeah, you're right it's hard to focus on something - it's like a bunch of boxes put together on a white piece of paper...or shall I replace "put together" with "thrown"? Reply
3ogdy - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkthis is actually inspired by that so-called interface that ended up without the name....and yes...Windows 98 looked MUCH BETTER than the one carrying the same name but without the "9". Reply
1d107 - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkXP color scheme for the traditional style desktop looked better, IMO. XP offset the pure grayscale default colors a bit to make it look subtly more cheerful. Switching back to pure Windows 95 scheme always made the interface look more gloomy for me. Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkDo any of these options help:
Take care,
Anand Reply
NanoTec - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkI believe these only change the side borders. It doesn't add anything to the 'content' … no design changes have to add something, but if possible it should. In my opinion "reallyfreakinlight.jpg"adds something, not because of the color, but because of the slightly darker grey line on the left most edge of the right block of reallyfreakinlight. (Reminiscent of a shadow, it creates an illusion that the content –the central text and articles- are their own discrete unit.) Reply
prismatics - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkMassive improvement. Nice work! I disagree with the comments about the white background; it's pretty much common knowledge now for web designers that black text on white background is the most accessible. Reply
UpSpin - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkI think the problem is the huge white space on the left and right of the article, which could be darker, just as it was in the old design, which still had black text on white background.
Maybe no fancy colored gradient background, just a solid grey or gradient grey? Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkHow about any of these:
Take care,
Anand Reply
Friendly0Fire - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkAgreed. Don't let the haters get your morale down Anand. This is a nice refresh, and I'm sure the details can be ironed out over the next few months. Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkThank you, it's hard to please everyone but there's no harm in trying. I'm taking all of the feedback to heart and will try to do as much as possible. Reply
Friendly0Fire - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkAnd thank you for not only running this site, but being so proactive in the comments section despite the terrible negativity I'm seeing.
I've been looking over the comments a bit and thinking what I'd do if I were to change it. I went ahead and tried altering the CSS a bit, just to get a feel of how it'd look like. If you're curious, here's what I had:
There's not much of a change because I don't think sweeping changes are necessary, but some more margins and an ever so slightly darker background can help a fair bit. You'll note that sites like Engadget and others have also adopted the idea of "white but not quite".
Just my 2 cents, keep up the good work! Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkThat's exactly what we're playing with now, I think it may end up being the best of both worlds. We do lose some of the coolness on images with all white backgrounds but it makes the text so much better to read.
Take care,
Anand Reply
at80eighty - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkAnand - i concur with the repeated example of Ars Technica. An 'inverted' option would be great, as some / many experience less eyestrain in that setting. Also consider The Verge's approach to typography (broad statement is broad) as they use it rather effectively.
Kudos on keeping up with the times and making this a site i haven't stopped visiting since the day i started. Reply
phillyry - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkBut strenuous. Reply
IVIauricius - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkFeels cluttered. I like the simplicity of the old design. Reply
3ogdy - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkEXACTLY! The whole page is messed up and cluttered as hell! Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkThe front page definitely has more information density (interestingly enough, a lack of density was one of the big complaints when we went to the 2010 redesign) - but do you believe that article pages are also more cluttered than before?
Take care,
Anand Reply
This Guy - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkArticles look fine. It's the four different ways of displaying content (with three styles) on the front page's main column and the five on the right column (with five styles, not as bad on article pages).
This is just me personally, but I passionately hate both jumping between massively indented blocks and the three coloumn layout. If you must have columns, please have five or more so the pictures, menus and ads can stay to the side and the content I'm interested in in front and centre.
I've looked at your banner and column ads many times, so much so my next computer is going to be all asus, consair, ocz and g.skill :p Reply
LauRoman - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkAaaah... my custom userstyle for the site doesn't work anymore. Reply
LauRoman - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkAlso maybe an edit button... timed like wordpress or the verge, if not permanent. Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkHear you loud and clear for an edit button, I think that's a good idea and I've added it to the list.
Take care,
Anand Reply
htnawsaj - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkSame feedback as on twitter,
Twitter and Facebook feeds take much space in a post with out comments,Also the Link Contact etc at the bottom are too bright.Orange color would have been better than the Red.
Also the pages looks cluttered, like more info compressed into a single page. Reply
akedia - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkIt's very visually noisy now, very unpleasant. Is there any chance you can put in a button to bring back the old view like Ars Technica did when they, too, opted for the cluttered look? Reply
3ogdy - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkGreat idea! Reply
p05esto - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkSome good things for sure. Just get rid of the Facebook and Twitter feeds (my god, how oldschool is that crap these days)..... and I don't really think cell phones belong here, but I can life with that. Just keep the Apple garbage off the site and I'll stick around.
The size of the site is good, I hate sites that break the 1024 resolution. I open windows, never full screen. I think the contrast is abit too much, but maybe I'll get used to it. Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkThe FB and Twitter feeds are a necessary part of things now - promoting sharing/following is something we all have to do in order to expand the reach of our content.
Is your contrast complaint primarily about the margin color, comment background color or something else?
Take care,
Anand Reply
Stahn Aileron - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkThis kinda feels like the Ars Technica redign all over for me again. The main page feels cluttered. I actually starting ignoring the Ars main page because of the cluttered feeling. The articles themselves are less cluttered. (Less sidebar items on the right.) Actually, I just took a quick look at the AnandTech mainpage. Yes, this definitely feels like Ars redesign all over for me... I mainly use direct RSS/ATOM links to get to an article, rather than using the main page. Any chance the articles/posts can be cleaned up a little? The right side really feels crowded. (I use neither FB or Twitter, so those sidebar plugins are a distraction and waste of space to me. Thogh I do understand the need to integrate them in this day and age.)
I also prefer a slightly darker design. I'm willing to live with this, but I think the rest of the site kind of contradicts the design of the site banner/logo in terms of color scheme. Reply
bernstein - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkhey exactly my thoughts, completely abandonend arstechnica then, then found the featured articles rss feed and switched to reading those via google reader... kinda sad but if they want to loose the quality minded readers fine with me, more time to read nature/science... Reply
3ogdy - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkI share the same opinion. I'll end up reading anandtech through RSS so that I no longer have to see this awful page. Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkIn your opinion what's the cause of the clutter? Is it the 2x2 article area below the featured review that you're not happy with or something else?
We specifically went for greater information density on the front page but wanted to make the review pages easier to read, at least on the latter part it seems like you're happy with that but there's concern about the FP being too cluttered. Do you believe the tag homepages are also too cluttered (e.g. anandtech.com/tag/smartphones)?
Take care,
Anand Reply
1d107 - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkI share the sentiment about Ars Technica.
The new metro-based, tiled design has large pictures and very small amout of text rendered in small grey font. This makes the most important part of each item, the one that conveys the actual information, it makes it very insignificant part of the design.
How can you say that the information density on the front page has increased when the text accounts for may be 15 - 20%. While pictures, that frequently don't convey any info, occupy about 50% of each articles tile? As a result, I don't get enough info from the front page to decide if I need to read the entire article to not.
Look at this: "Apple has the luxury of not competing at lower price points for its Macs, which makes dropping hard drives an easier thing to accomplish. Even so, out of the..."
What does it tell me? Nothing, and the picture to the left of it? I am a visual guy and like graphs and all kinds of pictures that help to understand the topic. But the one to the left of "A month with Apple fusion drive" hardly adds more information. The last five words of text? Nothing. Out of the entire text and the entire tile, it may be 5 words in the middle that carry only a couple bits of information.
Compare this to Slashdot. There you actually get more information from the front page.
Anand, I admire Anandtech and people who work and write excellent in-depth articles. It is the site that is the authority on many topics and there is very little that can be done to prevent me from returning here. But let's just make things easier for people who comes here for information. Reply
1d107 - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkJust looked at th lid site link somebody else posted (http://web.archive.org/web/20130215182244/http://w...
Definitely, the front page now has far, far worse information density. I could quickly browse through the old fron page and know a lot about the sfuff that I am not interested in. Now it requires to op.. (clicks the link) ...en each article to get more that one bit of information.
Scrolling a little to the next article summary was fast. Opening each article now is slow. Will it bring more clicks for advertisements? May be, but then will more people come here more often? Hmm... Reply
Stahn Aileron - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkThe Tag pages are bit better. The stop sections don't seem as packed with information. Still, I do find them quite dense.
The 2x2 area seems a bit much on the FP. This is especially true due to the fact one slot is occupied by an ad. I prefer ads off to the side in their own, easily identifiable locations rather than inline with the core content of a site. (There have ben time when I just leave a site when I realize half the "content" in the main area are ads and not actual posts. This has been mainly on forum sites though.)
I also think the site is a bit narrow. I'm on a 1920x1080 monitor. The white borders on the side seem to take half the horizontal space at a glance. I find it a waste, but you really can't account for ALL screena and window sizes. (People don't like reading horizontally for too long anyway.) This is an issue that been in place since WS ARs became the norm, so I can't say much nor fault the design much, if at all.
In regards to all the comments about the color scheme, I think the white in the borders is what is bothering me the most. It's pure white with no content; it's hence quite bright relative to other pieces of the site.
As for the overall "clutter" feeling, it's a 2-fold issue for me:
-(1) Many of the windows I don't care about and are therefore irrevelent to me.
-(2) Some areas blend into one another due to the uniform use of white for the BG without some sort of visible divide between them.
(1) is just a personal thing. I'm somewhat minimalistic with certain things. For websites, I generally prefer minimal parsing to find what I want/need. (It's a different story for me in regards to productivity work, like spreadsheets and other apps that use a standard layout and just spit raw data at you. That I can handle in dense data form.) I don't use Twitter, I don't care about FaceBook (the account with FB is purely for volunteer work I do for a site), and I stop bothering with DailyTech long ago (Ars is far better, IMHO).
(2) is also something of a personal thing. I'm used to desktop applications that have options to help give me visuals cues of when one block of data starts and ends. As such, I'm used to seeing dividers of some sort between items (even if it's just a centered one pixel tall by 10px width line.) Kinda like the comments here now. (The lines are kind of faint on my monitor, but the reply buttons are another readily available "divider" of sorts.)
Ars Technica is the site closest to AnandTech in design now that I frequent just as often. If I had to choose, I think I'd prefer Ars' 2-column layout over AnandTech's current design. The extra data density over there is devoted to actual content on the site. (Featured articles, newest articles, and related articles are all they really display, in addition to the requisite ads.) Here, there are 3 gadgets/plugins I personally find utterly useless to me.
On a side note: can we get slightly bigger text boxes for comments with an actual scrollbar? I'm on IE10 final. All I get is a box about 5 lines tall with no scroll bar (just arrow buttons). It makes it much harder to edit long comments such as this.
I hope everything I said makes sense. (It's 0330 for me right now.) Reply
MrSpadge - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkFirst reaction: WTF?! Upon 2nd glance, however, everything still seems to be accessible.
It's nice that the tweets are way down the list now.. as you're using it like a chat, and with just 1/2 of the conversation plotted it's not much use to read it anyway. That Facebook bar seems totally useless if you're unfacebooked. The pipeline section, which I often enjoy reading, somewhat fades to the backgroud now with those low contrast light grey on dark grey letters. I suspect white (or almost white) would be better. Reply
MrSpadge - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkOne more: it's nice that the comments don't have a headline / subject anymore.. this was pretty much useless anyway. Reply
etikka - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkNot bad! You should definitely look into responsive web design, so that the site works well on small (mobile) and large screens. It is a standard on all well designed sites nowadays.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsive_web_design Reply
bernstein - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkyeah one more site that still requires horizontal scrolling at half width of 1080p (e.g. ~950px) Reply
3ogdy - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkBut remember not to completely screw the page design. Oh, and remember your website fan base was NOT BUILT on users coming from MOBILE devices...remember REAL COMPUTERS STILL EXIST. Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkDefinitely at the top of the list :)
Take care,
Anand Reply
NetSoerfer - Thursday, May 09, 2013 - linkAlso, please look into the top menu. When I try to go to NOTEBOOKS & DESKTOPS > NOTEBOOKS REVIEWS with Chrome for Android, I inevitably end up in one of the trending categories (that are underneath the NOTEBOOKS & DESKTOPS rollover). Reply
SodaAnt - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkI like it, but I really think that there should be an invert button for AMOLED cellphones (save battery life), and that logo just feels...wrong to me. I'm not sure its really the logo itself as much as the weird box it seems to be put in, but it doesn't look very good to me.
Rest of the site is great though! Reply
3ogdy - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkthe logo isn't only worse than the previous one, it doesn't fit within the page's so called "design".... Reply
MadEmperor - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkCluttered mess of a site. Horrible redesign, I hope this is just the default Geocities does. Reply
B3an - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkIt's not bad...
But as a web designer myself i'd really like to see 'responsive web design' added to this site. Which incase anyone doesn't know, is when you resize the browser window, or use a different resolution device, the site will adapt and scale the layouts width automatically. A good example is microsoft.com, try resizing the browser window and watch it adapt.
It would also be nice to darken the design a little, maybe have a light-ish grey background instead. This white will strain my eyes when reading long articles. Or maybe add an option to switch between light and dark themes (like Ars Technica).
Also this comment post box should be resizeable.
Apart from this stuff it's not a bad design, i don't find it any worse than the old design, but i don't find it better either because of the things i've just mentioned. It certainly looks more modern atleast (everything has been heading Metro for some time now) if a little too generic and similar to many other site designs. Think you need a more defined colour scheme and specific little graphical tweaks to stand out more. Reply
B3an - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkOh and another thing, as others have pointed out it's a little cluttered. You've got rid of dated design stuff like gradients, drop shadows, texture emulation, shiny/reflection effects and so on (take note Apple) which greatly helps make the site cleaner, but then you've ruined it by making the layout a little too cluttered on the home page.
The AnandTech logo also looks out of place because it still has all those old design styles i mentioned above. Flattern it out, make it larger :) Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkI think that's a valid complaint on the logo side, we didn't go for a redesign this round but it's definitely something I'd consider to modernize it a bit.
Take care,
Anand Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkResponsive or something mobile specific is coming. On the background side, do any of these options help:
Take care,
Anand Reply
Cliff's Esport Corner - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkI think the new layout is to "busy", and I agree with some other comments that the translucent text overlay is not a good idea.
A suggestion, if your wanting to keep current layout, maybe add easy to find button for simpler, less cluttered layout?
As it stands I am likely to bookmark the RSS feed page and use that, so I can find stuff more quickly.
Tested new look on Win 7 on 13" ASUS UL30V: Chrome, Lion OS on 27" iMac: Firefox & Chrome, Blackberry Bold 9780: Native browser, and iPod Touch 5th Gen: Safari Reply
lordjmann - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkThe turquoise on light grey is really not working for me. I know you're trying to use your colors but there are several contrast issues present. Light grey on turquoise doesn't work well either. Reply
MadMan007 - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkYeah, shiny. I dub the new look Anandgadget :)
There is one thing that has bothered me ever since the 2010 change, I think I've written it before...searching articles brings up way too many results with no organization. The front page was already blog style, the search results were (and are) too. It's ok for the front page, but when searching I am often looking for a specific article, usually a longer review rather than a short 'pipeline' piece. And yet I end up having to wade through all the search results to find what I'm looking for, and for some terms that are mentioned a lot that can be a *lot* of articles.
Could there please be a way to limit searches more? Options for All, Reviews, Articles, Pipeline, etc would be a great help and make the site much more efficient to use. In a similar vein, it would be nice to be able to filter article categories by type. I see there are new dropdowns for categories but they are still too broad (I think they are just new links for the old categories?) ex: 'Notebook reviews' has pipeline blurbs about graphics drivers, Samsung UEFI issues, Micron ultrathin SODIMMs, etc. These are clearly not 'notebook reviews'.
I think search and category fsub-filters would make the site an even greater resource than it already is. Thanks! Reply
bernstein - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - link"Options for All, Reviews, Articles, Pipeline, etc would be a great help" yeah i strongly second that. if not well... -1 reader. Reply
3ogdy - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linklet me correct that : "if not...well...-THOUSANDS of readers" Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkI agree completely on the search side, noted and added to the list.
Take care,
Anand Reply
Silma - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkCongratulations on the redesign which seems nice enough.
However, if you are serious about Smartphones, please optimize/offer a smartphone version. Of all the tech sites I regularly read, Anandtech is by far the most painful to read on my not so small 4.7" smartphone, with huge loading time as a bonus. Reply
3ogdy - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkoh...don't be like that...they screwed up the PC version of the site in order for people who read this page on the move to enjoy it more....what you're telling them is "what you were trying to do with this page for us, mobile readers, is a complete failure and a pain in the neck (or eyes)...so CONGRATULATIONS - you also managed to screw the desktop users in the process! Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkNoted and already on the list :)
Take care,
Anand Reply
bernstein - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkMay i kindly suggest adding an option to hide all the pipeline articles (and show only reviews) on each category...
Sure you want to promote pipeline, because it attracts daily visitors, but honestly anandtech biggest asset are it's in depth, high quality reviews.
People who visit the site weekly or even less frequently exactly because of that content, currently won't find these in a sea of news... which kind of makes anandtech yet-another-tech-news-site that somewhere deep down has great articles ***if you can find them***.
This kind of happened with arstechnica on their redesign, gone was the ability to filter out news from the articles, gone was i... now you can browse their featured articles and i'm back, but miss a lot of the in-depth reports because they are still mangled with news... Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkWe don't post all that many Pipeline pieces per day, and often times we end up posting some very good analytical content there as well. Significant announcements but ones that we don't have tons of time (or the necessary info) to go really in-depth with end up in Pipeline as well (e.g. our Clover Trail+ piece was a pipeline post).
I don't believe we do a lot of rehashing of news without analysis, otherwise I'd be right there with you in keeping Pipeline excluded from the main feeds.
I do think the mitigations here are 1) to make sure we can beef up our search engine and 2) make sure we don't end up posting news content with no value. One of my primary goals with Pipeline was to meet the same standards we set for our long form content, but with short form content as well. Whether pipeline or an in-depth review, I hope you find the quality of the content just as good - the only difference being how much there is to talk about.
Take care,
Anand Reply
RippaSplitta - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkReminds me a lot of The Verge, not sure if that is a good thing though. Going to take some time getting used to. Reply
Zink - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linknope nope nope Reply
3ogdy - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkit's fail fail fail....then bye bye bye ;) Reply
T1beriu - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkOuch! My eyes!!!! The white is killing my eyes and I have my laptop brightness set to its minimum. Please use a neutral color like gray instead of the white.
Apart of that I love it. Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkDo any of these options help:
Take care,
Anand Reply
T1beriu - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkThe grey option works the best. But I think you have to go a step further to reduce the eye strain, by using a 10-15% grey for the text background.
Thank you Reply
Rand - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkMuch much better. I like the darkest of those best, but any of them would be perfectly fine with me. It's just the pure pitch white that's harsh. Reply
Kiouerti - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkI agree with most readers. It seems like there is too much clatter and too much contrast. Is it feasible to add an option to customize the site—change the contrast, size of fonts, and amount of columns? Or perhaps an easy way to return to the old design? Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkOn the contrast front are you talking about the color outside of the margins or something else? With there being too much clutter, are the tag front pages any more amenable to you (e.g. anandtech.com/tag/cpus)?
Take care,
Anand Reply
iamnotark - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkNot responsive: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsive_web_design... For what it's worth, you could probably add the bootstrap js and css files and redo everything in about an hour.
Account creation "please fix the errors" displays no visible errors. No useful information in the Network Request log either.
Who doing your QA? Fire them. Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkResponsive/mobile focused is coming.
What information are you looking for in the network request log?
Take care,
anand Reply
skiboysteve - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkI don't like the hover over drop down menus. I primarily view this website on my HP Touchpad and Nokia Lumia 920. I can't hover over... And tapping doesn't do anything Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkTapping should do something, looking into this one.
Take care,
Anand Reply
skiboysteve - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkThank you for looking into it! Have Brian load up the page on his 920, the taps don't work. Might be a problem on any windows phone 8 IE10 Browser. On my iOS device tapping shows the drop down menu. Reply
Klimax - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkSurface Pro - same thing.
(Also comments still require compatibility) Reply
skiboysteve - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkYeah I've never been able to comment from my Nokia Lumia 920's IE10. I just got the spinner forever after hitting submit. There is no compatibility mode on windows phone so I have to comment from a 3rd party browser app like I am now (UC Browser). I haven't tried it but it sounds like IE10 on my desktop would have the same problem Reply
Egg - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkI agree with a lot of the things other have said.
I have my own beef though: Pipeline now takes a very long time to load; over 10 seconds for me. Is anyone else seeing this problem?
Also, I'd like to see Twitter above Facebook. The Anandtech editors always have interesting comments on their twitters, while the facebook feed is just a list of articles... Reply
Egg - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkAlso, the spinner for adding a comment has strange transparency issues. Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkFixed the spinner issue - haven't seen the pipeline issue, are you still seeing the problem?
Take care,
Anand Reply
jefmes - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkLooking good so far. If no one has mentioned it yet, it looks like your Cloud/Datacenter & IT drop down across the top is dropped under your ad space. Can't really see what the 3rd and 4th options are. :) This is on Chrome beta 26.0.1410.28 beta-m Reply
jefmes - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkActually...huh, it looks like it's not all ads, just the longer G.Skill ad so far. Reply
teryan2006 - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkFar too cluttered. There's not enough white space between the components on the page. Too many dividing lines, unnecessary gradients, borders. The trending topic bar sticks out like it's added as an afterthought. There's no consistent design language besides the use of same font and color. Reply
teryan2006 - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkWorse part: the spinner when submitting a comment (it's where the submit comment button is). Like some GIFs that's lifted off somewhere and there's white pixels all over it. Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkThe posting animation should be fixed now :) Reply
3ogdy - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - link+1 ...or +9999999999999999999 actually Reply
bromega - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkI've been an avid reader for 4 years now, and just signed up to say the white background is awful. Reply
3ogdy - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkCongratulations for that! That is something worth telling the one who "redesigned" this page.. Bring back the good (and not really old) Anandtech Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkDo any of these options help:
Take care,
Anand Reply
bromega - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkThanks for the reply, but I was talking about the text background. Black text on a white background is too much of a departure from the subtleties you had going with the grey text background. Reply
staiaoman - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkwow...i thought everyone was following google's lead and pushing everything towards a simpler look. this is pretty disappointing. the articles are now needlessly in two columns (so i can save on vertical scrolling..?), then broken up by "more pipeline stories" then continue underneath?
was writing a stream-of-consciousness for what goes on in my brain looking at the new site, but decided to annotate a screenshot for max clarity. i annotated the ad-less version, since i have a suspicion that most anand readers use adblock
http://i.imgur.com/7GrDFPt.png Reply
maximumGPU - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkalthough i do like a few of the design decisions, i absolutely agree with you on the "pipeline--more pipeline in the middle" thing, it's terrible. Reply
staiaoman - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkalso, i feel like kindof a dick- anand is my #1 favourite site on the whole wide world web. i do 90% of my desktop/workstation research here, i've gotten a sizable portion of my education in tech (especially SSD perf, CPU architecture, and virtualization) from the articles here, and i frequently cite it in my [tech] job to colleagues and friends. i do make huge buying decisions based on the advice here, and i hope that amazon and newegg have some sort of cookieness magic to know that anand is much to blame^H^H^H^H^Hthank for my decisions in tech purchases.
<3 always, even if its tough<3
-Dom Reply
3ogdy - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkeven if it's tough to read anything anything on this page right now Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkI appreciate your support :)
Do the tag frontpages look any better to you? e.g. anandtech.com/tag/cpus?
The point behind having more pipeline stories integrated into the main feed was to not only provide an outlet for even older pipeline stories (presumably we'd post pipeline stories more frequently than articles, which can cause them to fall off the fp quicker) but to also visually break things up a bit - and in the process give pipeline some additional attention.
Take care,
Anand Reply
maximumGPU - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkJust a quick post to say light grey is a very nice improvement, keep up the good work. Reply
killerclick - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkPretty, but no responsive design and or mobile version. Not sure if there's an option to edit comments either. Otherwise, looking good. Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkBoth are coming :)
Take care,
Anand Reply
ThanosPAS - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkBad use of space, too bright, looks cheaper-maybe better tab fonts. Reply
3ogdy - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkAmen to "looks cheaper" Reply
Imaginer - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkThe color scheme for text and background before was MUCH easier on the eyes. Why the high contrast white?
And is it me, or does this new look scream "me too! I am hip and trendy!" Reply
3ogdy - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkCouldn't agree more with you! Reply
Navvie0 - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkThis is awful. Far too bright, and too much contrast.
Have a look at avforums.com. Their off-white / light grey / nearly-black colour scheme is much, much, easier on the eyes.
The intense bright white and high contrast makes it difficult to be here. Please tone it down a bit! Reply
ltcommanderdata - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkI like the new visual style, but as others have said it does make the homepage few cluttered. The large main article, followed by the 2x2 grid of featured article, then the pipeline highlights below does serve to highlight new and important articles, but means it takes more scrolling to get to the chronological listing of the rest of the articles which I like to do to orient myself on what I've missed and just feels like the "meat" of the site.
As well, your shortcut menus on top don't properly follow their categories. For example, clicking Samsung under Smartphones & Tablets seems to like any article that is tagged Samsung including laptops and SSDs rather than just smartphones and tablets as the category implies. You might also want to consider the ordering in the menus perhaps the smartphone and tablets links first as overall categories followed by a dividing line and then shared specific components, ie. SoC, followed by a dividing line, and then the specific companies in alphabetical order. Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkThank you for the feedback - very valid point about how the cats/supercats are currently organized.
Do you believe that showing the top 3 - 4 articles at the top of the fp, in addition to the most recent pipeline posts doesn't give you a good feel of what you've missed? Are the tag front pages any better (e.g. click on SoC)?
Take care,
Anand Reply
3ogdy - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkPfff....just when I thought Anandtech was still stylish, there comes a screwed up design that reminds me of the awful Windows h8 interface. And the logo and the top of the page now make Anandtech look like a CHEAP page people barely know about. Lack of style at its finest.
This background is awful - it hurts on my 10.1" netbook screen, I don't even want to think about viewing it on a 23" LCD... sorry Anandtech, but the "brand new" design is WORSE than the previous one, which in turn was a clear step forward compared to the one it replaced.
I'd LOVE to be able to choose the page styling, like choosing a page skin /theme.
I'm definitely considering not returning to this cheap, mostly-ignored(I know it's the exact opposite, but this is how it looks like!) page. Sorry, Microsoft's engineers were drunk when they designed their latest operating system's interface for the Desktop - don't follow them.
I'll stick to Tom's Hardware and maybe some other pages, Anandtech looks awful now. Reply
karasaj - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkI don't mind the widescreen stuff. It's like it used to be, just white. I wouldn't mind a darker option though, but I love how the site looks now. Thank you! Reply
UpSpin - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - link1. The new design looks modern, the old not. So I like it, somehow.
2. The front page is cluttered. I barely noticed this article because it looked more like an advertising image/banner than an article, because the text was in the image, it just didn't looked like an article.
3. The second issue got caused by too many different styles. staiaoman mentioned a few of them. First is a main story/image filling the whole width, then 4 reviews as a block, then AFTER scrolling a list of pipeline stories, then after another scroll further articles/reviews as a list with images. On the right top the missing pipeline stories in 3! different font sizes, on the right AFTER scrolling dailytech news in a different layout, wow, not consistent.
4. A lot to scroll, too much to scroll, especially if you consider how much free space is on the left and right. This free space is white, which is bright, which causes eye strain, please use, for this white space something different than pure white.
5. Widescreen: You made a new design, yet haven't changed anything fundamental. Why don't you make more use of widescreen. Make it dynamic. If space is available move the dailytech news to the right of the pipeline news (less scrolling, more info). In your articles, if space is available, automatically move images to the left and let the text flow around it (less scrolling, more info)
so yeah, it looks more modern, but usability got worse or at least remained unchanged. Reply
3ogdy - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - link1.Modern doesn't mean better anymore not nowadays with a stupid Microsoft and a style which is actually VERY OLD but it is colored, unlike the one from more than a decade ago.
2.Exactly....cluttered is a very nice word, though...I didn't even know this was an article,...I just clicked on it and I got here-
3. CONFUSING is the word.
4.It hurts my eyes with brightness set to the minimum...I can't set it any lower anymore.
Computer display expand horizontally( FullHD is 1920 x 1080...and does the word "Eyefinity" tell you anything, Anandtech?) and Anandtech completely IGNORES that .
5.The exact same thing I've said at Nº4.
Modern doesn't mean better - and somehow modern has become less useful and more annoying nowadays(I'm looking at you, Microsoft...and Anandtech) Reply
average_joe - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkApologies if I have missed this, but Anand could you please give a brief overview of the implementation details of the site with regard to technologies and tools to create it? Thanks. Reply
Elnrik - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkIs there a way to make the background light grey, or something other than the glaring white? Thanks. = ) Reply
Elnrik - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkAlso, I think it is a very functional and stylish design. Looks good, I just prefer darker backgrounds.
Thanks Reply
3ogdy - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkit actually couldn't be worse. Reply
3ogdy - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkYes, stop visiting the page. It seems to be the best way unless you have Anand's phone number. Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkIs something like this what you're looking for?
Take care,
Anand Reply
Pfffman - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkThose would help :)
Game Informer has a "Lights off" option which pretty much reverses black and white on text which could help with that? Just a suggestion. Reply
Dupl3xxx - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkOverall very neat and stylish design. But, as others before me already pointed out, a dark / black background with light text as an "opt in" would be nice for those late night readings ;)
And of cos', keep the great quality content coming! Reply
Ikefu - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkThe contrast is way to high. I really do not like white backgrounds as it is unpleasant to read for sustained periods of time. The other issue I have with the background is that I think it is the cause of the cluttered main page feeling.
The main page seems very noisy to me but the more I like the more I think this is caused by the high contrast making every background to content box transition scream so loud it pulls your eyes to it and away from the content itself.
I do like that there is more content on the main page scrolling down. Kudos there! But though I like the "More Pipeline Stories" box I think the high contrast is making it seem a very jarring transition between the recent stories and the older. (Also, story picture scaling seems an issue) Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkDo any of these mockups help?
Take care,
Anand Reply
hughlle - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkA little bit cramped on the main page, but otherwise I think it looks great. Text on white doesn't really seem to be an issue for me myself. When reading I'm rather used to black text on white page, for some reason.
My only request, canwepeasehave a section on the drop down menu for components, for peripherals. I mean you've only in the last week reviewed a keyboard, but should I wish to look for a review of that keyboard, or say a mouse, where would I look without using the search feature which in the past has proven a touch difficult in terms of the relevance of the results to what you really want. Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkVery good point - will add it to the list :)
Take care,
Anand Reply
Hlafordlaes - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkI am fine with the site changes.
I would like to see the prominent DailyTech sidebar get nixed. The site is of far lower standards than AT, and often spouts anti-science. Not the best company to keep, IMO. Reply
3ogdy - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkJust took a look at the Bench section... it would actually be VERY DIFFICULT to make it any WORSE!!!!!!! What's the point in changing the colors for the comparison bars and use a fading effect...????? They're supposed to be clearly visible, not invisible! God damn Anandtech! Reply
Rand - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkI like the new design overhaul, it's a small but appreciated improvement.
My only complaints are the sheer stark whiteness of everything, as others have said it's so glaringly bright it's a little straining on the eyes. Not unreadable by any means, but it's not a particularly pleasant site to stay on for long.
A slightly grayer tone to the white rather then strict 255:255:255 would be a huge improvement.
Aside from that, the only thing I might change is having slightly bigger text blurbs under the first four articles. Their a bit short now. That's a small thing though, the layout I like. The colour scheme is fine... just not so heavily contrasted please. Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkAre any of these better?
Take care,
Anand Reply
Rand - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkAny of them is a substantial improvement, the lighter grey or grey are the nicest of them IMO, but really any of them would be perfectly satisfactory.
Thanks. Reply
Sapiens - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - link- The color scheme is too bright.
- Searches are still a crapshoot without any way to filter the results.
- Pipeline stories are split between two different sections of the page.
- The Facebook pane appears to serve no purpose other than to link to random articles.
- The Twitter pane appears to have no redeeming value whatsoever, unless you're into vague and out of context conversation snippets.
Overall the front page layout seems very cluttered and difficult to parse. Personally I'd love it if there were two simple columns with the same style used beneath "More Pipeline Stories", with one column for reviews and the other column for everything else. I'll stick with the RSS feed. Good luck with your next redesign! Reply
FunBunny2 - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkLooks at stupid as the New Yahoo! (!, for emphasis). Why is it better? You should be able to defend the design. Polling for support is cowardly. Reply
DanNeely - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkPlease add comment counts to new pipeline entries. Adding them to the older ones just makes their absence up top more glaring. Reply
Lifted - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkWhite and grey everywhere. My eyes! Reminds me of Toms Hardware when that site became hideous a decade ago. Multiple shades some light ugly blueish/teal color with light grey and white and bright orange. This is the one of the worst color palletes I've seen. The old site was cool and soothing on the eyes. The redesign is migraine inducing.
All of this white is not green. :( I think this solid white background is going to double the electricity my monitor uses.
No more monitor section? Oversight?
We know you can do better than this! I knew it wasn't April 1st, but I still took a peek at the date. If it was, I think we all would have had a good laugh. Unfortunately it's more fitting to cry. Reply
CeriseCogburn - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkThey're all on dope, that has to be what happened.
How can a tech site be this stupid ?
Are the same retard design "artists" controlled by some supercorp that screw them all ?
Maybe the amd fanboys would like to reveal on that. ROFL Reply
Iketh - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkThis white is gonna make reading a pain late at night just before bed...
As for the widescreen optimization, I say ignore them. I don't think they understand why most sites are not optimized for widescreen... Reply
psuedonymous - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkIs there a way to shunt the pipeline back off the main page and onto a separate one? Previously, I could easily glance at the main page for new articles while having the pipeline loading in another tab, then switch to that to look for unread news posts. Now, the pipeline splits up part of the main article list AND is split between two sections. You now have to actively hunt through a list of titles in two separate locations to try to guess which was the last one you actually read rather than simply scrolling through a page of full articles.
The new layout makes it harder to find articles or posts, and harder to read them. Please add an option to revert to the old layout for better usability. Reply
Reflex - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkLooks decent although I have to ask why DailyTech is still there polluting your credibility. Reply
Hlafordlaes - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkHey, there, Reflex! Beat ya to it a page or so back. Reply
Icehawk - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkNot as terrible as Gizmodo or Engadget's terrible redesigns but I much prefer the cleaner and simpler previous site - I don't need to see 100 things at a time. I feel like this is the Metro version. Reply
Sudhakar - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkJust a few comments. Been a regular reader for 7+ years, first comment.
I come here to read about PC components. While I understand the new format / emphasis on other segments like mobile, I would still like to have a single page for all PC components. For example make the PC components tab at the top an actual page, instead of a placeholder for the drop down menu.
Also, the site has to much white. I liked it where there background was blue. Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkSo make the supercategory link to a supercat front page, not just a dropdown - interesting idea, will note it.
Do any of these options help on the contrast side:
Take care,
Anand Reply
tzhu07 - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkFrom the perspective of a front-end web developer, the loading time of the site can be improved if you placed all the JavaScript before the closing body tag. That way, the primary elements of the site (HTML / CSS) will always get loaded quickly while the JavaScript kicks in afterwards.
As for the design, there is a lot of white contrasted against very dark elements, which doesn't jive together. Take a look at this page:
The above is an example of a very bright website, however because of the color pallete used, the header, footer, and side widgets fit in nicely and nothing feels overpowering or distracting. Reply
Pfffman - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkJust read the About page. The comment about treating readers like idiots, while I understand you actually mean people who just make the comment "Andorid is ugly, Apple is pretty therefore get Apple", most of the time I feel like an idiot when I read some of the articles just because I don't know enough to fully understand/appreciate it. More so for the PC components, I generally look at the introduction, some benches and then conclusion since I every time I try to read the other more in depth analysis, I feel completely left behind (CPU architectures especially). Is there a recommendation to a reliable and way to come up to speed about these things (apart from Wiki)?
I also agree with what the others say about usage of screen. Currently I just zoom in to fill the screen. While I do appreciate the larger font it gives (no I don't need glasses), the sheer amount of white space there is at 100% zoom is maddening. I use Chrome on at 24 inch 1920x1200 screen and 150% is comfortable, but I zoom in one more increment just because I can.
Nice redesign as well :D And keep up the podcasts! Reply
Murloc - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkmake the background not 255 255 255 outside of the text area like it was before, right now it stings a bit. I can see that the new design is following a trend of simplification, but the shiny plaque thingy where you put the logo goes in the opposite direction imho. Other than this minor stuff it looks cool. Reply
10101010 - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkAnand, overall the new site design is a good step forward. I especially like the improved speed of the comment system. But please fix the overwhelmingly bright theme. It isn't healthy for one's eyes, especially at night.
Fom the marketing angle, the bright theme usually means "fake". I'm not sure that's what you want for your brand. Keep going with this redesign. There's some good stuff in it, but there's more work to be done before it reaches the quality that is synonymous with your brand. Reply
mokahless - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkPlease, please please bring back the old design. It was easier on my eyes.
The new site looks like the random mess most other sites like TomsHardware look like. I liked the simplicity of the older site with the scroll topics at the top and the single line feed at the body with the preview of the topic. I could see at a glance what is new and it was easy to use. I think the new site is a mess. The old one seemed more organized with all the elements attached and looking like they belong together.
Barring that, the white everywhere theme is over the top and makes it difficult to read.
I believe the old site was both easier to read, easier on the eyes and looked more professional.
So I would like to request that the site be reverted. If more people disagree with me, then I guess I don't have a case but this is my opinion. Reply
AgeOfPanic - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkNice work guys. Looks a lot more modern, maybe a little bright. I find the frontpage a little confusing though, with pipeline stories divided over different boxes and then main stories divided by one of the pipeline blocks. Not as self explanatory as it could be. Reply
sibuna - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkanand, IMO this one looks the best given the options you posted
http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/grey.jpg Reply
Death666Angel - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkI agree with a lot of people here that the color scheme is not working for me. Makes my eyes hurt. Granted, I could dial down my brightness. But I don't have to do that for any other website or program.
As for the general layout, I'll get used to it. It's disorienting at first all the time when designs which I am used to switch (and I doubt the usefulness of the switch every time). But I'm not going to complain too much, because it still always happens (new means better after all).
I don't need widescreen support btw. I almost always browse with the browser window only occupying half the screen (best addition to windows, ever). :) Reply
hanse - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkOh, the humanity... Please make it stop.
I think your fine site has been infected with the Windows Metro virus. (and the MS Office no borders GUI 'look at me I'm so minimalistic you have to notice me'-interface)
P.S. I'm sure the new design have some good stuff under the hood, but I'm interested in the reviews and articles not the design of the site. Reply
1d107 - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - link+1E100 Reply
Beagus - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkDont really like the white. Makes it sterile and not more professional looking than before(was good before). Besides hurts my eyes at night. The rest I can get used to. Reply
AckPhbbt - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - link
The new layout is really busy now. Not sure it's really an improvement or not. Maybe I just have to get used to it. Seemed easier to find things before.
The new font's however... Ug! Text appears vertically "squashed" & somewhat blurry. Definitely harder to read. The light gray text on dark gray pipeline story column is especially bad. My eye's are straining to read that stuff now.
Really wish it was the previous font, with higher contrast text...
-- Ian Reply
cantcurecancer - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkHow about something like this: http://i.imgur.com/rjX9FDH.png Reply
Stuka87 - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkPersonally, I think I like it. The real question will be if the comments section remembers my username and password now. It never did before. Reply
bigboxes - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkI do not like the font. Mostly the font in the titles, but also the text and it's readability. IMO, you should keep the font used previously. Anand, I noticed that you have repeatedly replied to concerns on the new look by posting three links to alternate looks. I liked the first one with the darkest gray for the accent. Thanks for all do Anand. Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkWhat about something a bit more subtle: http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/reallyfreakinl... ?
Take care,
Anand Reply
hbarnwheeler - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkI still have to strain to read the grey headlines in the Pipeline Stories section. I think it is more a matter of small text combined with prominent serifs than it is a contrast thing. Reply
bigboxes - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkThe serifs. It looks bad. It's like even the small letters look like capital letters. Reply
TechcoreUmmon - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkAnand,
The font choices in the new redesign has some issues when viewed without font-smoothing. Here's a couple examples:
This is using Chrome 25.0.1364.152 m on Windows 7. Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkHere's a potential solution:
What do you guys think?
Take care,
Anand Reply
KoolAidMan1 - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkIt looks good! Reply
roberta - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - link@Anand.
Much Nicer....
But, have u looked at ArsTechnica's SUPERB "Light on Dark" option?
Go to ArsTechnica => Top Left "Main Menu" => Right side "Site Theme: Light on Dark"
Something along those lines would solve the hard on the retina brightness issues....
Best Regards,
Roberta Reply
aaaaaaaaaaaaaa - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkWhat have you done to the font? It's completely unreadable now, antialiasing should NOT be used for fonts this size.
What have you done to the eye burners theme and background? The old site was bad, but now it's horrible, everything white. Everyone knows you have an affair with Apple, but this is going too far.
You have lost a reader until both are fixed. Reply
HibyPrime1 - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkMuch better Anand, the very light grey background makes reading significantly easier. However that odd brushed metal like texture on the main logo background is completely out of place, it's gotta go. Reply
KoolAidMan1 - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkThe redesign is a failure purely based on the fact that the awful DailyTech is still on the sidebar.
When is that tabloid going away? Reply
repoman27 - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkSorry if this is a repeat, there are a lot of comments up here at this point, but the Pipeline News link at the bottom of the page seems to be busted at the moment. Reply
thep - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkI was surprised to see that neither the "Pipeline stories" nor the "More pipeline stories" header links to a separate pipeline news page. At the bottom there is a link to a "Pipeline News" page, but that page (http://www.anandtech.com/pipeline/) does not seem to work. Anyway, because getting one single page with all the recent pipline stories would be much faster than having to click on each story separately, I would prefer to have such a page as in the previous design. The way I used to read AnandTech was to look at the main page, and if there were any new articles I'd open them in separate browser tabs, and if there was anything new in the pipeline I would also open the whole pipeline page in a separate browser tab. But I'm sure there are as many ways to organize browsing of the content as there are readers and it's probably impossible to please everyone.
Overall, I like the look of the new design (including the content width and the color scheme, although the 'reallyfreakinlight' side background would be even better), but I prefer the structure of the previous design. If it were up to me I would remove the "More Pipeline Stories" box altogether (since they would be on a separate page, and I've already read them all anyway), and have all of the main column in the very nice design that is currently below the "More Pipeline Stories" box. But thanks for all the excellent work so far — I just hope that the redesign in the end won't make it more difficult to access all the content. Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkFixed the pipeline URL :)
More stuff coming. Reply
Ometecuhtli - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkThe letters 'l' and 'f' of the new fonts appear bold (f in the main text, l in subtexts). I don't know if the font you are using I do not have installed in my computers (I have also seen on my desktop, a windows 7 system, and in this laptop, windows 8). Does anybody know about such a problem? Is it font related or something else? Thanks for your help. Reply
Kristian Vättö - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkIan, our motherboard editor, had a similar issue. Can you check whether you're running Windows in "best performance" or "best appearance" mode? Especially the "smooth edges of screen fonts" might have an impact on this. This fixed it for Ian, so might be worth a try :) Reply
TechcoreUmmon - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkI'm not sure if your designers ever tested without font smoothing.
The problem with the above solution is that windows font-smoothing results in blurry text, making it all but unreadable to my eyes. If you have no plans to fix the fonts (as in, stop using chic google fonts or some such), I'm just going to use the stylish extension to replace all the font styling on this site to saner and readable choices. Reply
agent_x007 - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - link1) Comments to articles must have date... but with TIMESTAMP near it : http://img407.imageshack.us/img407/5984/timest.png
2) Can I get timeline filter of comments to articles ?
I mean : A time based version of "last to first" or "first to last", for comments.
3) Other thoughts : http://www.anandtech.com/comments/6822/welcome-to-... Reply
war59312 - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkPlease hide the number of comments on the print page.
You really think anyone cares to waste ink on showing the number of comments. :p Reply
war59312 - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkAlso please don't show "Posted in" on print pages.
Again, who cares when printing and a waste of ink. Reply
lmcd - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkCouple thoughts: I really think the white is too bright sometimes, but useful at others. Would it take a lot of effort to add a slider to shift (all the) white to gray? Or cooler yet, have it figure out local time for the user and shift with that?
Another: Mobile? Right now Chrome on SGSIII gives me the desktop site, is there not a mobile variant? All I'd say is for a mobile version (if there isn't one) give the body front-and-center and make the sidebar like the FB, where you tap it and it pops out (whole thing would scroll separately from the main body. Reply
a2f - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkWhat's a "pipeline story"? Reply
xaueious - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkLooks nice, but I am going to have to get used to the two-column layout -_- Reply
Peanutsrevenge - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkOh dear :(
Hey Anand and all who have been working on this.
I'd like to start with the good points (which I'm not good at). I like the overall layout and colouring, it's far sharper and different sections are well defined.
The top level categories should be links not JUST drop downs, I absolutely HATE that, why can I not click on 'PC Components' go to that page and see all the PC Components stories in date order and be able to click 'Motherboards' in there, so when I'm done looking through motherboard stuff, I can click 'back' and then 'CPUs' without having to go to the top of the screen, wait on the drop down, move mouse down to CPUs and then click. It's stupid and annoying.
Why am I not able to go to the pipeline page and see all of the pipeline stories? Why am I only permitted to see what you show on the main Anandtech page?
'Pipeline Stories' and 'More pipeline stories' should be clickable to go to a dedicated page and flick through them all, going back as far as we have time.
Improvement stuff (which I hoped to find in the redesign or be coming soon):
Clicking an author should take us to a page about them, including their tweets, stories, rants (cough - Brian-Cough), Bio, contact info etc.... but predominantly showing stories/reviews by them, so we can look back through them for whatever reason (get some idea of how their views tally with ours when deciding the validity of the latest review).
Our own account page should show our own comments and replies to our own comments at the minimum with additional stuff being cool.
The search function needs updating badly. It's so hard to find the article I'm actually looking for. please put some advanced search functions in or SOMETHING as there are so many articles here now, many on similar subjects or mentioning different products that finding the right thing can be really tricky.
Just being able to narrow search to CPUs or motherboards etc.. would really help.
I don't wanna be some 'change is bad, was better before...' kinna guy as change is important, but it's important to get it right and these are some things I believe need tweaking, others would simply enhance the current experience.
I look forward to seeing what you come up with over the next few months or so, unless certain annoyances get so bad I give up and go back to Toms (OMG, shudder @ the thought ... ya see, ya see what you've done, you've made me ill and mentally unstable!). Reply
dark4181 - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkYay! Persistant log in! Reply
dlock13 - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkI like this color option: http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/reallyfreakinl... or in one of the first posts, I like the dark grey such as the color you have in the pipeline stories section. Reply
YFDO - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkHi Anand,
I know you guys worked hard on the redesign but I prefer the last one because it feels less cluttered.
Here are some of my ideas on how you can improve the webpage.
1. Combine the whole top bit into a single background up to the trending topics.
2. Make the pipeline section in the right a bit longer and get rid of the pipeline section in the middle. It feels weird to have two sections for the same thing.
3. Remove the light Gray line in the pipeline and make the text a bit bigger.
4. Make the dalilytech section a single solid colour.
5. Remove the border around the facebook section.
6. Demand better advertisements that match your website's style. Get rid of the flash ads and the ugly ad choices bit.
7. On the reviews section after the pipeline section in the middle, maybe move the topics to the top of the reviews, to achieve more separation.
8. Add a separate pipeline page, so that a click on the "pipeline stories" will take you there.
9. I prefer the dark border in your mock-ups.
10. Maybe make the post your comment section a bit bigger.
11. At he bottom of your main page, make it into simple "Next page" and "Previous page" buttons.
Hope it helps.
Anyway, all the readers come to Anandtech because of your quality of articles and your dedication towards the readers (and maybe Brian's rants) and a simple redesign is not going to stop them. Reply
Leyawiin - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - link"Ooh - shiny!"
Too shiny. The webpage needs to fit the widescreen width and if it can't do that please return the easy-on-the-eyes dark background for the wasted space on either side. Reply
kureshii - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkOn Pipeline Stories: Rokkitt is a nice header font, but is much less unreadable at smaller sizes: http://i.imgur.com/tMsGx0x.png
Also, the navigation header seems to be shunted to two lines. Probably not what you wanted in full view: http://i.imgur.com/jnvyV5a.png Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkHmm there seems to be a font problem here, that's not what the site should look like (here's an example of what it should look like: http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/redesign/ooh-3...
Can you email me details about your system software configuration/browser (anand@anandtech)?
Is anyone else seeing similar behavior? Reply
Sleepingforest - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkThe banner doesn't blend with the dark gray background behind it. It's a very surface detail, but it looks really unprofessional compared to the rest of the site. The large number of colors and fonts (teal, which doesn't quite match the logo, a brushed aluminium look behind the logo but nowhere else, two kinds of gray and black, plus orange, a different font for "About/Advertising/Bench, the smaller headings, the body text, and the comments text) is also a little overwhelming. I also kind of miss the long article blurb on the front page that comes before actually clicking on the article.
On the other hand, it's now much better on my iPhone than before, so definitely props for that. It seems like every site is going through a Win8-esque transformation--Anandtech has handled better than most. Reply
Sleepingforest - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkFixing it, fortunately, should be pretty easy. A single sans-serif fonds for headings and titles and a single serif'd font for comments and the article body. Only three shades of gray: a black for background, a gray for the pipeline bubbles, and white for titles within the gray/black. Reduce the light effect on the logo a bit to make the color match up more closely, while also either removing the light effect behind the word "Anandtech" or spreading it across the entire top bar. Reply
GiantPandaMan - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkI like the redesign except there's just a tad too much white. A darker off white for the borders please and shrink down the bright white text area so it's just around the text maybe?
Actually hurts my eyes on my desktop. Not as bad on my laptop, but that's because it's easier to change the brightness on there. Reply
lunarx3dfx - Saturday, March 09, 2013 - linkOk, I've put off complaining about this for a long time, but now that we have a full redesign I can't hold off anymore. How can you guys focus on mobile devices so much, and still not have a website designed for them? Can we please have a mobile friendly site?
Outside of that, the new look will take some getting used to, but overall it looks ok. I would like to see a darker background like others have already mentioned.
Thanks for all the hard work you guys do. Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkWe've replaced the bright white with a subtle grey site-wide, hopefully this helps alleviate any issues!
Also if you're seeing strange font rendering issues can you email me directly (anand@anandtech). What you see should be similar to these screenshots:
Thank you all for the feedback and for taking the time to comment.
Take care,
Anand Reply
Peanutsrevenge - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkBetter.
Thanks. Reply
kgh00007 - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkThis is the second of my favorite websites that has recently undergone a redesign that has made the website more difficult to read on tablets. The text is too small, even when zoomed in. Its smaller and harder to read than the previous design and the pictures have been made smaller too. With more and more people consuming media on tablets moving forward, you really need to think about what your website looks like on a tablet. I never read anandtech or any of other websites on a laptop or PC any more, I read them on my nexus 7, just like a book.
On the previous design it was easy to zoom in to get nice sized pictures on the front page and decent sized text, now it's all small pictures and tiny text and is really hard on the eyes. As others have said, it actually hurts my eyes to look at, maybe it is the combination of tiny, skinny text and the overwhelming amount of white in the background. I vote that you bring back the previous design, there was nothing wrong with it in my opinion, but I'm all for progress as long as it's in the right direction. Maybe some adjustments could make this new design better! Reply
poohbear - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkVery nicely done! Most certainly more smartphone friendly! Good to see u guys being progressive! Reply
toyotabedzrock - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkCould you make it a little more gaudy and hard to read?
I think your designer might be a bit color blind. Reply
capeconsultant - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkI usually hate big changes but I love it! Great work. Never easy, and a thankless but very necessary task. Congrats. I prefer centered content and hate wide screen crap. I got a wide screen so I could see TWO websites, not more of one :) It is a pleasure to be a part of such a successful and independent website. I have been around since the beginning. Reply
I am as mad as hell - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkThis was overdue. But it looks great! Reply
GatoRat - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkNot so good. Has anyone, anywhere heard of usability? Seriously. Congratulations on joining Microsoft, Adobe, Android, the company I work for and everyone else who are convinced that you make things better by making them more complex. Whatever happened to form follows function?
Oh, and the sight is almost unreadable with the whatever the hell font you are using.
Oh well, this site was fun while it lasted. Just unbookmarked it. See ya. Reply
alpha754293 - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkHow do you get to "IT Computing"? Suppose that you didn't even know that that's what one of the articles was filed under- how would you get to it?
(I was looking for the Opteron 6300 review that Johan did as a test and with the new tags - you can't even find/GET to the article. So; while it's still present on the first page - 6 months from now - unless you know what you're looking for, you'll never find it. It'll be lost on the site.) Reply
R0H1T - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkMy precious !
Although to be honest I like this new style, however I do feel that the content is lagging bigtime on AT these days ! What happened to the Kaveri rumors, I know folks here pick Intel over AMD but still, also how about a nice roundup of half a dozen or so top of the line IPS LED monitors(including some pointers on PWM backlight, color bleeding, ghosting et al) among others ? Reply
tfranzese - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkAn okay change I guess, but that logo is an eyesore. I think it'd look better if it was blended in like the last iteration. Reply
Evil_Sheep - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkThe new design is far from bad, but I have to admit I preferred the older one's cleaner lines. I'd echo the sentiment of others that the front page especially is a bit busy. I don't mind information density but some of it seems superfluous...distracting me from the "meat" of Anandtech which I come here for, which is the content/articles.
I don't understand why the "Pipeline" feed has been broken in two with half on the sidebar and half littering the main page.
Anandtech and the rest of the world have lavished unending praise on Apple for their sleek lines and minimalistic design. Would it be too much to ask for praise to be translated into practise?
IMO a good site design recedes into the background and doesn't draw attention to itself.
Just to be clear: I love Anandtech, the redesign is just fine (though I prefer the old somewhat)....but it could be better. Reply
Penti - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkSome quicks thoughts.
Hard to navigate and find stuff. No proper categorize / sections to navigate or to get to content under. Johan has no section/part of the site of his own so it's hard to find all his stuff. Just navigation on seemingly random tags doesn't really help or work, or get you anywhere. Pipeline doesn't have it's own section where I can list all the pipeline articles, so finding slightly older pipelinestuff would be hard or next to impossible. So better navigation is a must. I guess it's basically the same system behind the new site. It looks quite ok, I can get used to it and design has never been any attraction here actually so your not that accustomed or liked how it worked before. Redesigns can sometime lead to resentment on some places, sometimes they make it impossible to use as standard/not customized and in best case lets you choose to navigate the page more old school.
Fits my none full screen window fine, I hate it when some site has ads or other stuff and expects you running full screen so you have to scroll sideways to get to the content. Podcast page is fine I guess, so you can find them, but it's not excellent and you should also tie in video somehow. I like pipeline and think that should continue with relevant stories/news and background stuff, followups, prequels and so on. Maybe even add some other stuff there, smaller writeups of interesting stuff. Reply
jed22281 - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkNot bad, not awesome either, please keep iterating & refining (& listen to your readers), hopefully you'll get much better over time. Reply
kyuu - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkIs it possible for you to add a function to report comments and/or hide comments from a particular user? I'm all for constructive criticism, but sometimes the people that come crawling out of the woodworks to spew their vitriol all over the place is just unbearable. Something really needs to be done, and if moderation and reporting aren't in the cards, at least let us hide them.
Oh, and an edit function, please.
Otherwise, with a few tweaks that have already been brought up (ad nauseam), I think this redesign will work out great. Reply
1d107 - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkDo not let the web site designers use iPads and Mac books with retina display. Give them a 15 inch 1366x768 Acer widescreen laptop or, if they beg for it, a 24" 1920x1200 one.
Everything looks nice on IPad and a retina Mac. On a mainstream monitor though, the grayish article text is barely readable. It may be a choice of font, but most likely it is much worse pixel density plus lower contrast. Reply
SlyNine - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkI DONT LIKE CHANGE!! lol. Reply
johannes - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkHi Anand,
Thank you for the great work on the site. I love the articles and the podcast for their depth, the commitment to quality and objectivity and the vision on trends and the future of technology. I like the new redesign of the site because of the cleaner look. My criticism would be that some parts have gotten more cluttered.
I agree with staiaoman [1] on a lot of points, the main page seems quite cluttered due to a combination of 2 columns of articles, the lack of borders and the large amount of white (already fixed, the softer tones are great!). My other main source of tech news/reviews (see [2]) had a big redesign as well recently. The main complaint was their white, borderless background, making the text "float' on the page, making it harder to read/straining on the eyes. They responded with a slider for users to decide what they prefer. Maybe that could be a solution?
Like other commenters I really like the neat list of articles and the anandtech.com/tag/<x> pages that you suggested still do that. The main page still does that, once you scroll past the 2-column and pipeline blocks. Maybe disabling those blocks could be an option in the user profile?
I made a mockup of these sugestions in [3].
[1] http://www.anandtech.com/comments/6822/welcome-to-...
[2] http://tweakers.net/ (darker margins can be set with the first slider under the 'gear'-button)
[3] http://image.vanluijk.me/screenshot.png Reply
nhp12345 - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkNice new outfit!! :) Reply
webmastir - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkLooks good to me. Keep up the great work! Reply
jtd871 - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - link+1 for adjustable fonts. Usually reading this on a 21" desktop monitor or 17" laptop screen (both at least 1080p). The font is too thick/bold and too much white space. I had no problems with the previous default body text. Reply
santeana - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkYou know... Toms just got worse with each new design until, eventually, I just stopped going. I check it out once in a while to click the quick news links and that's about it.... even that is getting boring now since it's always Apple this and Apple that.
Here, it's the opposite! You've gone through fewer changes, choosing to wait until it's really time for an update, and then you still manage to stick with what works and what your readers really want from a tech site. Way to stay in touch! Anandtech FTW! Reply
Touche - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkUgh, not again...
First of all - terrible fonts! Font itself, size, aliasing/smoothing/whatever...just terrible.
Whiiiiiiiiite, oh, the white! WTH?!
Flat, cluttered, grey text on grey backround, orange and teal, ugh... Some kind of Metroish quasi modern bastardisation of a design.
Yes, improvements will be promised, suggestions asked for...and hardly anything will change and an inferior change will be forced upon us, as always. Reply
valinor89 - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkI swear I read "Oh... shit" on the home page until after I read the article, and several dozen comments and then returned to the homepage.
As far as the redesign I think it resembles that of Ars Technica, specially that orange text in the header, but I like it in general. The only problem I had was reading the article with the glare in my monitor, with all that white in the sides on my widescreen. I had to put my monitor, admitedly a cheap one, in eco mode witch incidentally makes the white light gray.
I Love the new comments layout, and specially the "show all comments". Reply
colasumo - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkHey all, just a few things!
I don't check the site every day, but usually a few times a week to catch up on as much as I can (though, I do follow you in RSS - but most of that is headline skimming since there is just so much content to look at all at once and the tool usually comes out during short periods of time).
I think it would be beneficial if the title 'Pipeline,' in the appropriate box to the right, was a link to a blog-format display for Pipeline. I'm not saying to separate it completely from main site integration, but maybe a filter button because I see those as the two broadest of categories one would use right away. One *could* just find an article and click on the tag (if Pipeline had its own tag), but then one has to click individually on different headlines and it would be at least two clicks from the front page to consolidate the quick reads when there's not much time for just a partial read of something more in-depth.
An expandable comment entry field like reddit's (and many other commenting platforms). I don't comment very much, and I know that I'm writing a pretty long comment, but I feel that maybe 40% of the site's content is down in this section, in long and generally in-depth forms, especially compared to "First!" sites like Engadget.
One tiny nitpick: the Twitter box' grey could maybe match that of the Pipeline's - it's a little tough to separate the text from the background (both the blue and white). The new gray for the site's main background is great, though!
Lastly, if you're still considering the suggestion of a more responsive website, I do encourage you to check out http://www.smashingmagazine.com/ and play around with your browser's width for a minute and see how their site collapses while still keeping everything necessary in order to use the site as its main and intended function when screen real estate is at stake.
I like what I see with regards to the redesign! I just hope the content stays sharp. ;) Reply
emueyes - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkThe background colour here changed in the time it took me to read the comments ! I'd still vote for a contrasting colour in the sidebars, to make it easier to keep the text column in focus. There's some great ideas about contrast at http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized and while I'm not suggesting those colours be used, their comments on black on white text sound about right - it's more contrast-y than a book on bright daylight. And it hurts my eyes. BTW the ideal solution to the text width problem is a 20" LCD in portrait mode, I reckon. Reply
numberoneoppa - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkFancy! Looks great. Reply
Drazick - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkWhat about Google+?
Please, start using it.
Most sites of this kind (PC related) have more followers on Google+ than Facebook. Reply
Mezinger - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkSite looks great - nice job! Reply
MrX8503 - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkHere's a good article on Color theory.
Contrast reduces eye strain and a safe bet is a light background with dark text. In the "Pipeline Stories" side bar, the listed articles have too little contrast. The light gray text may need to be little lighter.
Aside from color, the site would benefit from responsive, but it would require a rebuild. Reply
johan851 - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkEveryone's going to complain about change. That happens. I'd be really interested in knowing a couple of factual things, if we can cut through the subjectivity I've read so far.
1) Why the redesign? What were your goals? I'm genuinely curious.
2) Are you A/B testing the new design? Reply
tim851 - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkI hate redesigns. Will give it a chance though.
BTW: In your timeline picture, the upper left layout - perfection. Clean, discoverable. Should've stuck with that ;)
I like the new comment-mask and prettified login though. Reply
staiaoman - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linklove how anand is so present in this thread. this is what happens when someone founds a business they're passionate about and then works their butt off to make it the best it can be Reply
JeBarr - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkYou can do whatever you want to the site design. Good or bad will make no difference to me because I'll take the time to adjust on my end as always.
Ads - GONE
Twitter - GONE
Facebook - GONE
Zoom is my friend.
Any of my true complaints have nothing to do with page design and everything to do with site functionality, which has fallen off since the previous redo and after reading all the comments I won't bother repeating them here.
Best of luck on your quest to further the cause of abandoning the core user base and making room for newbs/mobile users. It won't be easy. Never is. Reply
chizow - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkRedesign looks great Anand, although I do tend to agree with a lot of the comments about the deadspace on the sides being a bit much. I'd like to see AT do a bit more of the advertising in the margins like other sites, and less advertising embedded in the content with panels alternating between ads and pipeline/social media. Even some generic art from a current advertiser would be pretty cool to kill some of the deadspace. Reply
Touche - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkhttp://images.anandtech.com/doci/6822/throughtime....
Great to see that massive drop in information available on one screen. From easily accessible nice number of articles in the first four designs, we get this... Is scrolling a new sport?
The awful white and font is also interesting to see next to previous versions.
And the compression of lower articles because of that massive Facebook and Tweeter feeds...terrible! But you sure are trendy with social this and that shoving down our throats. Reply
AwesomeAD - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkSo, after years of merely lurking on this site, reading the comment explosion on this article drove me to create an account just so I can state the obvious:
If you don't like the design (due to personal preferences, obviously; you speak for yourself), then change it. userstyles.org and stylish have been around for virtually ever.
I didn't quite like the contrast and brightness myself, so I spent 20 minutes hacking some CSS to change it. Voila.
Here it is if you want to use it:
Feel free to use that as a base for your own userstyle (e.g. if you want the Dailytech feed to show up, which I've hidden in mine) Reply
This Guy - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkCan you please make the comment box a bit bigger?
Can you please move the "POST A COMMENT" button to the bottom of the comments table? The quality of comments on this article are lacking (including a few of mine).
It's great to get more people involved, but I stopped reading engadget and ars technica comments after their 'modern white tabloid' site updates. Please add as many features as you can to make it harder/intimidating for people to comment on articles. Reply
Deo Domuique - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkPoor Chrome has stuck on GDI like we're still on XP. They really need to implement Directwrite font-rendering. This is the reason I stop using Chromium after 10 mins. I'm going back to my favourite Firefox which with its tweaked Directwrite has the best font-rendering.
On Firefox the fonts are much better. Reply
EddieBoy - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkI have been visiting this site for years and always enjoy the informative articles.
I really like the new design. It is clean and modern. You might consider the very light gray border but I think it is still good without it. I also like the focus on things other than PCs. I usually come here to read the reviews on PCs and components but will now probably read some of the other reviews as well since you made them easier to find through the links on the front page.
I can tell that a lot of time went into this and appreciate all the work you do.
Now, if someone could tell me how to change my User Name on the site (not in the forums), I would really appreciate it. I was told to email Anand, which I did, but got no response. Now I know why -- he's been busy with the redesign! Reply
Pyrostemplar - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkWell, loooooong time lurker, register just to state: I'm sorry to say but it sucks. Appallingly bad in high definition wide screens. Reply
cybernate - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkI'm fine with site overhauls so long as they work. But what I don't get is why they always have to mess with fonts? There might be a reason why old fonts have been used for so long. Maybe they work? Yes, this new one looks very "techy" and "modern", but is it readable? Not as much as it was before. Please please switch the font back. Or explain what useful purpose this change served. Reply
Kill16by9TN - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkWell, it's gonna need a few days of reading to get used to the new design and changes in layout.
But, unless I am just not finding it yet, I am missing the possibility, to still open up the latest "Pipeline Stories" in one single, long page, that I could scroll through, reading from top to bottom and not being interrupted by comments, if memory serves. Those could now be hidden/minimized by default and only become visible, when wanted for any particular story.
How do others feel about this particular change to the Pipeline?
Now it appears, that I have to open each report individually, which is a lot more clicking around and moving back and forth. Reply
SparksIT - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkJust my two cents.
While there is more info (articles on the screen) I think you went to far to the other end of the spectrum. While the older site, had a large portion of the introduction for each article, requiring scrolling to get to the older articles. This new site gives you a picture and not even the first sentence. While it make sense for the older articles, it would be nice to have at least the first paragraph. Would make the site a bit less cluttered. Reply
sulu1977 - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkLesson 1: On a computer display you never, never, never, never, NEVER use a white background for text! Reply
benbenkr - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkAnd... after all these years, the site still has not went responsive.
I don't understand why. Reply
Furunomoe - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkThe main purpose I visit AnandTech is to read the awesome articles and reviews, and usually I use the print layout to do so. The new print layout is definitely much better than the previous. Now I don't have to read a very long paragraph stretched across my monitor and I can keep the styling now. Thank you very much!
The color theme is quite good for my taste, it's modern-ish and I certainly loved that.
Keep up the good work! Reply
yannigr - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkThe colors are totally wrong or I just haven't used to them. I feel like the new Anandtech is more like the AMD FX. After the first reviews everyone would prefer a 32nm Phenom II X6.
Fortunately you putted tweets and facebook in a place I can ignore. Otherwise Adblock elements would had fixed that. Not all users like to have a facebook or tweeter in their face on every page on the internet they look at. Reply
blue_urban_sky - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkI like the site and vote to keep the white. I have brightness set low and I like the ability to invert the colours and get white text on black. borders are not a problem as I always use browser zoom. font size is fine for me. not keen on the 'more pipeline stories' block. I like the hard corners, I like the tile look and I presume that the first paragraph will be more descriptive in future. Reply
Kjella - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkHow about a "report this post" that with enough hits will auto-hide it and make it pending moderation? I'm getting pretty tired of this comment spam, a comment field that looks like a landfill isn't pretty no matter how pretty colors you wrap it in. Reply
Azethoth - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkI second this. Also, open source the code so the entire internets can dump these useless tools. Reply
cyberguyz - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkI like to pop in to see what is new on a daily basis. Your old layout was a nice, steamlined way for me to do that quickly. This layout looks far more busy with a lot of confusing colors popping out at me on lots of close-spaced boxes.
UI Design tip: White space is your friend. Reply
cbf - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkAgreed! Reply
hbsource - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkGreat update. I bloody love Rockwell.
It works brilliantly for titles and short punchy bits of text. It's not so good for long pieces of prose (but you're not using it for that). Rockwell Extra Bold is also a decent option. I assume you're waiting for some really exciting for that one.
Keep up the good work. Reply
Azethoth - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkOmg yes! I can now go to a Dailytech article AND then, using my mouse browser back button, effortlessly come back here.
You guys rock. Reply
kagey - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkI like the new layout. Reply
owan - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkWhy do sites feel they need to re-design their layouts constantly? I have never, ever looked at the redesign of a site I go on regularly and thought "oh wow, this is exactly what was needed". What does this layout add, really, over the old one... or that couldn't have been worked into the old design language? THis new one is too busy and just looks like BS changes for change's sake. Terrible. Reply
pdjblum - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkagree Reply
shriganesh - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkNew changes are very nice :)
You could use ubuntu font though! Here is how AT looks (or made to look) in my browser:
http://s13.postimage.org/ccowq53hj/image.png Reply
Shadowmaster625 - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkHaha it takes some cajones to post that spam right off the bat. Reply
processinfo - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkI don't like how "print" button works now. It basically shows the same page as original except all article pages are on it. All banners and side bars are present. Then when printing they are removed but empty space remains where they were wasting paper.
Besides I really don't like the fact that different "print preview" is shown and then soemthing else is printed. Reply
JohnPete - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkI like it! Refreshing. Good change. It looks cleaner. Reply
kgh00007 - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkPlease go back to the old anandtech, this hurts my eyes! Reply
jlpurvis - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkyour logo is eerily similar to the AutoTask ticketing system logo. You might want to rethink it.
http://autotask.com/ Reply
Jden - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkI don't like the redesign at all. Please change it or go back to the old design. Reply
AssBall - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkThe adds show up way nicer on my windows phone with the new webcode. Half my anandtech page is adds now. SWEET! Reply
edwpang - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkI just checked with my on my 5.5" note II, the text is still a bit small. It looks like there is still no mobile version of Anandtech. Reply
Zap - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkI like the "OOH...SHINY" on the front page image. :D
Now to see if the redesign fixed being able to stay logged in. Reply
Gunbuster - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkFull screen I have big empty borders. Aerosnapped to half the screen at 1080P it doesn't fully fit. Worst of both worlds. Reply
redemmed - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkNice work, awesome new layout. Reply
GotThumbs - Monday, March 11, 2013 - link"We remain an independent website"
I'm sorry but the large fames to the right (FB and TWEETS) seems to counter that statement. It seems to me like quite a lot of landscape has been given over to these sites. I know I'm in the minority, but I don't use FB and I got bored of Twitter and canceled my account within a month. At least they are are below the pipeline and Dailytech frames.
Honestly, I tend to go directly to the Dailytech in recent weeks. This re-design gives me even less reason to hit Anandtech first. I've been a reader since Anand was reviewing hardware as a High School student.
I wish sites would try running both the old and the new sites live and let the traffic decide which is "really" better. Its just necessary to re-invent the wheel and paint it pink in the process as well. It should serve a purpose and do it well. No need to unnecessarily "be-dazzl" it IMO.
In the end, it won't make a diffidence IMO. The change has been made, so we just have to deal with it.
Just keep the hardware reviews coming and i'll continue to visit the site. Content is king.
Best wishes, Reply
GotThumbs - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkActually one thing AnandTech could do is setup an EDIT function for its comment section. I just noticed the double 'are are'.
Edit feature would be a real improvement other the old site.
Thanks, Reply
spe1491 - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkTried searching comments, but do not see anyone else mentioning this issue - I cannot get the page to load on my Android smartphone using the default browser. The browser just completely closes out when I try to navigate to the page. Using an HTC EVO Shift. Reply
bromega - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkI'd have to question why you've stuck with the default browser. Opera Mini, Opera Mobile, Firefox & Dolphin are all good ICS substitutes, and Chrome is great on JB. Reply
Hrel - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkDid you guys fix the comments so I get an email when people respond to me, and can then click a link that will take me directly to the comment? Or do I still have to try and remember EVERY article I comment on then go searching through hundreds, sometimes thousands, of comments to find mine again... Reply
jackoatmon - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkLooks a million times better. Great work. Now just redesign that awful early-90s looking logo and you'll be in bizznazz. Reply
Omega215D - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkI just realized that Dailytech no longer results in a new browser tab. It's pretty nice, I just have to remember not to close out the tab when finished with reading DailyTech articles. Reply
Imazalil - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkI like the new design, a few things bug me though.
1) I would just place the Anandtech logo on a black background instead of being boxed in as it is.
2) The Tweets & Facebook sidebars are too dark - they draw attention away from the actual articles / main body section of the site.
3) The footer might be better in one of the grays used in the Tweet/FB sidebar. There isn't that much content in it and the black makes it much heavier than it needs to be (I know it's to match the header).
Also, white background doesn't bother me at all - I don't ever keep my browser window full screen-width. Mac user though, so probably in the minority. That said, having an option to switch themes would be nice. Reply
cbf - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkWhat happened to the ability to collapse a whole subtree of replies?
I don't want to have to wade through dozens of replies to a comment that I'm not interested in to get to the next one. Reply
toast70 - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkI have been coming to this site for 10 years and to be completely honest this site is now gawdy and IMHO the color scheme is terrible. This may just be my opinion, but I am really surprised you guys went with such an ugly look and feel. I would like to see it back the way it was. I am sure that will not happen and maybe others like the new look....but I can say I hate it, but since i come here for the content and not the look I guess I am stuck with it. MANY SAD FACES =( -Toast Reply
risa2000 - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkReviewing the new pages on 22" 1680x1050 Eizo PVA screen, I would say that white does not really bother me much (maybe because I am used to low brightness which looks normally good on my screen).
What bothers me however is the plethora of "random" areas of different color (or different grade of shade) combined with different font. Right now, "post your comment" box in blue, next to it "TWEETS" in two shades of gray. Above "Facebook", "Dailytech" and "Pipeline", every different color, different form, different font size. These are really distracting and breaking it for me. Reply
marc1000 - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkI secont that about the different colors and fonts. Overall the layout is good, the tweeter/facebook integration are great, but there is too much things happening on the same screen now.
Also I really liked the ability to see the articles/news nicely ordered by date. Now with the different highlights on the first page it is a little bit harder to find the newest review/news.
I believe these contents should be more clearly specified too. I can't tell the difference between a review or a news just by looking at the tittle.
anyway, I will continue coming back! keep up the great work! congrats! Reply
vanteo - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkFor me, the default font now looks horrid. The Pipeline Stories box is barely readable (the smaller font). Reply
vanteo - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkChrome on Windows 7 x64 with 1600x1200 screen. Reply
vanteo - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkHmm, looks great in my Firefox, though. Reply
thetuna - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkThis may be enough to get me to find a new favorite tech site.
The only things that could have used changing were the header links (which got even worse! how is that possible?) and the comments system (which stayed the same; no way to see who replied to whom, no practical way to see more that one comment). Reply
lexluthermiester - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkAnand, this new look is going along the lines of "Windows 8"ish and is not appealing! Why on earth change something that works and looks good? Please change it back! Reply
fog - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkI have to agree completely about the Windows 8'ish style, I don't like it either. I'm getting the feeling of a "high contrast" scheme which isn't really optimal if you don't need visual aid.
I think it's to plain flat. There just is no shadows, and there's a lot of different colors like the site screams at you.
Unfortunately I think you've sacrificed the usability for "visual coolness", a trade off I'm not happy about.
One positive thing though is the comment section. It feels much better than before. Before it was squished into some boxes and hard to read, this is one are that has improved in my opinon.
Yet again, I'm sorry for giving more or less only negative feedback, but that's how I feel. I think you are doing awesome work and I think it will work out to the best in the end. Thanks again for a great site no matter the design. Reply
fog - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkI should clarify some things:
I think the middle section is fine (except for the colorfest in this "Post Your Comment" box). Top menu, footer, "Pipe lines stories"-box, Tweet-box needs rework imo.
Dailytech news works best of all the right side "boxes".
I like the background in the header, I'd like to see that as background for the menu-bar too.
I should add that the site looks completely different here on my Linux workstation than on your screenshot in regards of fonts. That wasn't a problem before either. Something to keep in mind, if you care about us Linux geeks :) Reply
ludikraut - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkI rarely post to comment on site layout, but when I logged into AnandTech today I was quite unpleasantly surprised. Quite frankly the redesign looks _awful_. The look and feel I could probably get used to, but what really kills the design for me is that I find it much more difficult to quickly scan through the main page of the site. Going from a main article header that is a tile two columns wide representing a picture with embedded text to a secondary area that is two columns wide with each 'tile' being comprised of a picture on top with text underneath to then a two-column-wide list of information to then (omigod how many times to we need to change the format???) another two column list were each entry is two columns wide with a (too large) picture on the left and text on the right ... W-T-F?!? Honestly it seems like an exercise in how many ways can we mash up content given two columns. Even Metro is less of a cluster**** than this. Isn't the point of good web-design for a page like Anand-tech to allow the reader to quickly, at a glance, identify the latest content and to then just as quickly go to previous content?
Please, please, give the readers at least an option on how to format the layout. ARS is a prime example of how to do this correctly, and I am super happy that I can still view their site in a simple two-column layout: articles on the left, toolbars on the right. Not only is this easily consumed, it should also be super easy to code. I really don't care about the color schemes, etc. (make it pink for all I care), but at least make the information legible again. Reply
michaelheath - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkI only have one comment, though it's a minor aesthetic criticism:
Against the subtle diagonal striped header at the top of the page, the horizontal 'brushed' background of the AnandTech logo looks out of place. Someone should probably decide on a design cue and stick with it. Reply
The0ne - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkLike the new design. The color scheme is easy on my eyes too. The black background gets my eyes all fuzzy :) The layout is fine how it is but having an option for a wider layout would be nice. I have to agree that reading a longer line of text is much harder then a few more lines; but then again having layout such as these may produced longer paragraphs and more so than anything bad writing, imo.
I have 30"s but I wouldn't want wider pages. The layout is fine and it doesn't seem like the sides are "wasted" on tons of ads. Reply
NanoTec - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkMinorBug: To reproduce: Be on the last page of the comments, click on the lowest visible page number which is not a 1, and then click on the previous page arrow. There will now be the last page number listed twice. This occurs when you're on that page, not necessarily by following these steps. Thank you. Reply
NanoTec - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkThe last comment posted is not showing up in the paginated version, but is indeed when view all is selected. Reply
NanoTec - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkThe comment this reply referred to, was on the very end of page 37, it is not visible, and is the last non nested reply comment.
The reply created a page 38. Page 38 is not selectable from any other page but page 1 at this time. Reply
AwesomeAD - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkThis appears to be a bug with the logic of the pagination code.
From playing around with various starting sites and using the 'back/previous' and 'forward/next' links, what the code seems to do is load the next set of pages so that the new 'current' page retains the same index among the pagination list.
Example: if you are on page 9, and 9 appears as the third number ( [1] [8] [9] ...), if you now click on 'next', you will be on 10, so the code shows [1] [9] [10]. The current page, 10, is still 3rd index from the left.
What happens though when there are no new pages to pull from the right to fill the remaining indices? That's when the code decides to display the last page twice. Reply
watersb - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkLove the new design. Color scheme works fine for me also in "reverse color" on my iPad 4 (late reading in bed mode) Reply
otherwise - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkOne major nitpick here -- clicking on the subheaders at the top "PC Components, etc" should bring me to a page with all PC Component reviews. Having to choose a sub category is already frustrating. Reply
Andunestel - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkAgree. I prefer the [darkest] grey to the other options, and especially to the current implementation. Reply
ClockHound - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkAnother trendy re-design - rounded corners are dead. Again. The new 'modern' right angle boxes from a previous century are hip again. Gotta love screen fashion trends.
I know white is the new black and all, but for for the love-of-large-format-monitors, even #f6f6f6 is too hot. Where is the dark grey option? Reply
AwesomeAD - Monday, March 11, 2013 - linkHere:
On a semi-related note:
For a website that caters to the supposed tech-elite, you'd think users would be a bit more pragmatic and a bit less whiny when it comes to small issues like this. :) Reply
Daneel_ - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 - linkI have to agree with the following:
"I rarely post to comment on site layout, but when I logged into AnandTech today I was quite unpleasantly surprised. Quite frankly the redesign looks _awful_. The look and feel I could probably get used to, but what really kills the design for me is that I find it much more difficult to quickly scan through the main page of the site. Going from a main article header that is a tile two columns wide representing a picture with embedded text to a secondary area that is two columns wide with each 'tile' being comprised of a picture on top with text underneath to then a two-column-wide list of information to then (omigod how many times to we need to change the format???) another two column list were each entry is two columns wide with a (too large) picture on the left and text on the right ... W-T-F?!? Honestly it seems like an exercise in how many ways can we mash up content given two columns"
It feels extremely disjointed. I used to use the Anandtech site as a style-reference which I pointed other people to. Now, however, it has become the very type of site I try to avoid. The colour scheme is neither here nor there (I prefer the dark grey, for reference), it's more that the layout doesn't lend itself to quickly figuring out important information. If I just want to check whether a new article has been posted I have to scroll an inordinately large way down the page (it's off screen, even on a 2560x1440 screen). Please Anand, at least relegate the 'trending' stories to the sidebar - that's a much better use of the space and keeps the main area free for the primary purpose of the site - quality articles.
Thank you very much for your time - I've been a reader for many many years now (before the last redesign) and thank you for your fine efforts. Here's hoping the site may regain more usefulness. Reply
Mugur - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 - linkI don't like it. At least, bring back the white background for the main content area. This very light blue/grey is feeling like I've set wrong the color temperature on my monitors... Reply
tbonesteak6666 - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 - linkI have been a lurker for a long time. But this new design pushed me above the edge to register. I think it's too flat and ugly. My display resolution is 1920x1200. When I click on e.g. "Pc Components", the menu takes a lot of real estate, it's not good. Also, please don't use capital letters in menus, it's like shouting. If I would write in capital letters, would you read it? Wouldn't you be annoyed? Because of courtesy, I decided against it.
You make the menu's much more appealing by making them smaller, so you don't loose much real estate. Reply
jramskov - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 - linkYou use gray text on a gray background for the older stories in the pipeline - that's quite difficult to read. Reply
Jhlot - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 - linkIt is not as aesthetically pleasing as the old site because there is too much white now. Reply
Silenux - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 - linkHi.
There is something bad with the fonts.
I see a lot of pixelation on Chrome.
Also the password reset email links to
And that doesn't work.
To change the password you have to go to
http://www.anandtech.com/Account/Details Reply
Omega215D - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 - linkI'll just say even though I don't have a phone with AMOLED display the extreme white background would kill the battery life of those who do.
The display on my Rezound is a bit on the warm side so the site redesign isn't blinding but the margins are a bit large, especially for those with 5 - 5.5" display phones. Then again I can narrow my browser window and fit something else on the desktop monitor. Ugh.. life is full of compromises. Reply
dado023 - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 - linkhow to switch back to previous design?
I find this new design really not needed, just confusing me, ergo i will read and visit anandtech.com not so much as i did before......sorry, but thumbs down from me. :\ Reply
cmdrmonkey - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 - linkIt's 2013 and still no mobile version for smartphones? For shame Anandtech. Reply
ahmaden - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 - linkget my annadtech back :( Reply
brianb_01 - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 - linkI visit this site several times a day and have for a few years now. Just want to put my two cents in that I don't care for the redesign. Reply
level1james - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 - linkThe only thing that really stands out to me is the sidebars on the right.
the gray on gray on black, white on dark gray on light gray, and the white on light gray on light gray just has weird contrast.
Also the logo. the brushed metal background looks a bit half-baked.
looks good otherwise Reply
antoinedurr - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 - linkThe biggest issue for me is I no longer know what to look at. The ads flash and slurp all over. The masthead is mostly an ad rather than a bold and aesthetic statement of where I am. There are no less than two pipeline sections, one of which cuts the content in half. Nevermind if this layout is too wide, too narrow, doesn't work on this or that gadget. There's no focus, that's the main problem. All the layout stuff is secondary. Reply
ludikraut - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 - linkYou need to use something like ABP to ditch all of the adz. It's even better with the element filter added to ABP. Between the two of them I no longer have to look at annoying FB integration or the even more annoying twitter side-bar. Just a nice, clean masthead, the pipeline sidebar and dailynews sidebar and the article. Of course, it still doesn't fix the main issue with the new redesign, which is the schizoid layout on the main page. Reply
Octoberblue - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 - linkWow, looking at the oldest screen shot really brought back memories. Things were more exciting to me back then. When new diy hardware changes made a huge difference in your day-to-day user experience, not just in games, but ordinary desktop apps. I guess when hardware was slower it was more exciting to be in on all the speed improvements. That's the irony: nice that everything is so fast now, but somehow not as much fun. Reply
Saruji - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 - linkYeah so NOT A FAN. Loud and intrusive, whats is all of a this billion gigabyte of data coming at me at the speed of chrome...and which of them are ads? Let me break this down really quick, here is your most popular section, its called, "Smartphones & Tablets" with a strong focus on the sections titled "Apple" and "Android"....suprise! Next popular on the list will be "PC component" with a focus on cpu, this section and subsection will likely mostly consist of apple haters being hip to the idea of diy pc! (Pssst, it will have a strong android section readers correlation). I have been reading articles on the site for almost 16 years, there used to be a "linux" section that would get updated almost annually! I was really hoping to see some converging(and improvement) or cross tests of sections, which is what your supposed "smarter reader" audience is looking for. I imagined things like Phoronix/Slashdot with added Anandtech original content all fused together for an immensely enjoyable read. If you wanted to improve the site, fix the search function, maybe come up with some original ideas for interesting articles and investigative reviews of projects? I dont know, but this redesign looks like, and no offense i'm being frank, engadget took a dumb, which tells me you want their readers. As I see it you have niche readers, that seem to care about things like screens on a tablet or phone, and the technicalities that you go into. The audience that you seem to be marketing is not your audience, its someone elses audience and they do a far better job at entertaining them with shiny. SO MUCH NOISE! Reply
YukaKun - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 - linkThe white abuse hurt my eyes while reading a long article. I liked the color theme from the previous design best.
It's a good design overall, but there's something that keeps me from liking it.
Cheers! Reply
ludikraut - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 - linkOk, some final comments/thoughts/questions on the redesign. As I stated previously I think the new homepage layout is an unmitigated disaster. However, I do like the new masthead and menu. It is an arguable improvement over the previous release.
Some of the sub-menu choices are odd, and the menu headers are not clickable - i.e., I can't click on [Smartphones & Tablets] to get an overview of that topic. It only gives me a drop-down menu. IMO it would make more sense to mouse-over for the drop-down and click to get a page that shows the topic(s). While we're talking about the smartphones/tablets section - why on earth do HTC, Samsung, and LG rate their own menu entry? Why not Nokia, Acer, etc.? Or more logically, why not a menu item for hardware or manufacturers or something like that?
Also, I think the "trending topics" is a complete waste of space. I mean seriously, does anyone care if GPUS are trending higher than Storage? Total waste of vertical real estate, IMO. If you must have trending topics, put them near the footer.
The new tag-based approach is a very good thing. Kudos there.
Instead of the MORE PIPELINE STORIES, how about just a simple link in the pipeline sidebar that says MORE? You can either have it dynamically extend the sidebar to show the rest of the pipeline stories, or have it take the reader to a page that's dedicated to pipeline stories. It would do a lot to clean up the disjointed look of the homepage. Then you just need to marry the 2x2 grid to the older stories listed below - i.e., either ditch the grid and just go with left icons/right text or go all grid. Personally I'd ditch the grid. Also, why does the DailyTech sidebar no-longer open in a new tab? Again from a design perspective I'd prefer to be on a new tab anytime I'm leaving the current page.
Lastly, if some of the design philosophy behind the redesign was inspired by Metro, I humbly suggest reading up on the Metro design principles (for example here: http://ux.artu.tv/?p=179). IMO it's actually fairly well thought out and we can see a good implementation of it on Windows Phone. Not-so good on Windows 8, unfortunately.
l8r) Reply
PsiAmp - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 - linkWhite font on a grey background hurts to read (e.g. in tweets and pipeline stories sections). Reply
omgia - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkPeople are always down en mas about site updates but this one is much better than most I've seen. I agree the white on grey tweet text is fairly difficult to read, but otherwise, I like it. Good Job. Reply
Beenthere - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkThe fonts don't display properly on my screen. The "Post a comment" bar only shows: "POST A". It's a strange look from the previous design which was fine on my various PCs. Reply
Elroko1 - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkSome thoughts regarding the new site lay-out::
- Pipeline fonts almost unreadable. Grey on grey, who thought of that? Needs fixing asap!
- Too much wasted space on top of main page. Forces lots of unnecessary scrolling.
- Generally, fonts look blurred on my monitor (24" 1920p, windows 7). Like reading an old pdf.
IMO, the current site lay-out is not on par with the quality and depth of its content. A terrific site like Anandtech deserves a terrific home page :) Reply
Osamede - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkThis is a good redesign except for one rather large screwup: the move to grey-on-black in the "Pipeline stories" sidebar and mid-section creates very poor readability and should never have passed even the first checkpoint, let alone to enter the final design and be approved.
The top bar with white-on-black is okay - but that is because it is all-caps and single words. But once you start trying to read the sidebar, the design reduces contrast and makes it hard to read the longer text there
Rule 1 of any publishing enterprise is to make it easier for the reader to read - not HARDER.
Fix this please. ASAP. Reply
DBissett - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - link1. The header "Trending Topics" needs to be removed because it appears on the same level as the choices to the right, which the reader expects to be highlighted as you select them. Instead, "Trending Topics" remains highlighted and it takes a while to realize that "Trending Topics" is actually a master header. This does not work well. 2. The homepage is made unnecessarily jumbled just by splitting the "Pipeline Stories" into two separate lists....Pipeline Stories and More Pipeline Stories. That's ridiculous. 3. "Tweets" just need to disappear. Who cares? Anandtech has more serious readers than to be interested in reading these one-liners. 4. And none of this feedback, or the previous 410 responses, makes a difference because nothing will be modified. After the 2010 changes the obligatory request for feedback came and went with no changes at all except that Anandtech got to appear that they "cared" about user feedback, and users got to vent, which is the MO this sort of thing. 5. If 4 is not true then after a suitable feedback period provide an article entitled "Changes we made to our new design in response to user feedback". Reply
haplo602 - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkNot liking it very much ... especialy the light grey on dark grey parts ... not very readable. the design is all over the place.
anyway the main point is, now the font on the site is unreadable. I'll have to change my browser settingd just for this site to make the font pleasant to the eye. Reply
AwesomeAD - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkTo Anand and your fellow editors:
As a daily AnandTech reader, after giving the redesign a couple of days to sink in, I'd like to 'formally' get this off my chest.
I have one major and one minor gripe about the new design. These are as follows:
-- 1. Colour Scheme Uniformity (major):
Honestly, the colors on the design are all over the place, it's a huge jumble of different 'schemes'.
Lets walk this down from top to bottom of the layout:
- Header: Dark grey background, white text (and a logo image that looks like it's from 2001; seriously, the whole design is about plain text/background and hard edges, and the logo is brushed metal/blurred overly blend?)
- Navigation: White background, orange text (dark grey/white submenus)
- Trending topic: Orange/black background
- Content: Turqoise breadcrumbs, slightly diminished white background, dark grey text
- Footer: black background (!), red headers, white text
And now the worst offender:
Seriously and in all honesty, it looks like whoever designed this had four different scheme concepts and couldn't decide on one, so he figured he'd just sneak them all in at various places. Except 'sneak' isn't the right term because the sidebar contents are huge (relatively speaking).
It's like 50 Shades of Grey Sidebars over there:
Pipeline: Black borders, Grey backgrounds with Turqoise text, coupled with dark grey background and dark grey text
Dailytech: Black header, white text, white border with shadowy white background image (!) on the content with black text
Facebook: Turqoise header, semi-dark grey background, NO border, and it's broken anyway (should be hidden in there's nothing to display)
Tweets: Dark header background, white text, semi-dark content background with semi-dark border, white text, orange 'follow' link
So, let's look at what we've got:
Backgrounds: Dark Grey, White, Black, Diminished White, Semi-Dark Grey, Turqoise, Orange, Light Grey, Red (!)
Text: 50 Shades of Grey
-- 2. Comments (minor):
The comment system has lost one of its most important features: the ability to tell, at a glance, which comment is 'original' (top-level comment on the article) and which are 'nested' replies. Furthermore, the nesting level isn't immediately discernible.
The strength of the comment styling in the previous design was that I could immediately recognize 'replies' and choose to skip over them until I found the next 'original' comment. This has been made a lot more difficult.
Also, and I admit I'm not sure how this was handled in the previous design, the pagination of the comments results in many 'orphaned' replies at the top. What I mean is that a 'nested' reply to another comment might get pushed to the next page. Loading that page displays the 'reply' at the top, withouth the ability to find out to what comment excactly it is replying to without going back a page.
This should be coded so that nested replies always appear on the same page as the originating comment, even if this exceeds the usual number of 'comments per page'.
Talking about code: why are comments (and their replies) not semantically nested? It's a single unordered list. In trying to re-work the stylesheet (more on this later) this fact proved a major headache, resulting in very unstable 'hacks'.
Finally, please (please, please!) add a pagination navigation to the TOP of the comment list in addition to the one at the bottom. Navigating comment pages becomes a huge scroll-fest this way (also due to the javascript that scrolls to the top of the comments after asyncing the next page).
Oh and could you add a 'resize: vertical' CSS property to the comment input box? :)
Now, I'm not just venting hot air here; I've put in a bit of work to try and 'fix' the problems I've encountered by creating my own stylesheet:
This isn't entirely a shameless plug, since it also gives you the ability to see how some issues *might* be fixed if you decide to do so in the future.
Here are two images for side-by-side comparison:
Sorry for the long post, I figured if you're gonna read 400+ comments you might as well read my novel ;)
Awesome A.D. Reply
haplo602 - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkawesome, worlds better then the original design ... much more consistent. Reply
AwesomeAD - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkYes, colour uniformity is a big issue with the current design. I'm no expert on colour theory (or design, for that matter), but I believe anything more than 3 main colors (or 2 main and 2 auxilliary) is excessive.
What's funny is that the issues were 'fixable' with mere CSS (though at some points some markup changes would be helpful) Reply
ludikraut - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkGood work! I like your style much better than what Anand & company put together, although I do think that the trending bar needs to go - utterly pointless, IMO. Your stylesheet seems like a pretty easy fix and similarly it shouldn't be too hard to fix the home page layout either.
l8r) Reply
AwesomeAD - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkYou are right. The trending topics thing is quite pointless (and, as I suspect, not at all dynamically generated as the title would suggest).
Let me see what I can do.
Going forward, I recommend you start discussion threads on the userstyles page because tracking comments with this commenting system is nigh impossible. Reply
Lucian2244 - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkI hate design changes, i've discovered Anandtech last year and just got used to the design and what i liked more was the colored background, in my opinion it was much more easier to read. Reply
Shinshin - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkHi,
Don't know if this is the right place and if it has been posted before but
I think that the articles background color should be different than the 2 empty columns at the sides.
There are no borders to the text blocks, articles, etc...
For me, this is disturbing. Reply
Blaster1618 - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkAm I missing the navigation, or have you not posted anything in a week?!? Reply
ludikraut - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkLet's hope that means they're seriously considering some of the feedback being provided here and are working on, erm, updating the update. ;-)
l8r) Reply
versesuvius - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkAwful design. A scroll is necessary every time. What I call web design disease has caught up with Anandtech also. Unfortunately that is. Because it is possible to do it, is not always a good reason to actually go ahead and do it. A good design, or what is knows as good design these days, the sane part of it at least, is giving the visitors at least 90% of what they are looking for in the first page or clean links there to. As it is, the new Anandtech.com, with its rude billboard sized item of the day gives you %5 of what you are here for in its home page. Look around, it suggests. Not good. Bring the old design back please. It was already bad, but this is the worst.
And tablet sections are "Samsung, HTC, iPad, ... ?" How ridiculous can one get? Anandtech.com was a tech site, not a propaganda site. This one goes way beyond design issues. It is a philosophy issue. I really don't know how that one can be fixed. Reply
Coup27 - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkI love this site and have been reading it for years, but I really do not like the new design. I think it lacks structure or flow and feels like everything on the wish list made it through regardless where it was placed. The website feels very random and cluttered.
For example we have 3 horizontal bars; one with Anandtech to podcast, one with PC components to cloud and the other with trending topics to AMD. These three headings are completely disconnected from one and another. To be honest they look like they've been made in Excel, not a professional design package. I don't actually understand the purpose of the trending topics bar. They are just repeated links to the topics that are already there.
I use a 23" 1920x1080 monitor and I have enormous white blocks either side of the main section and there is far too much white going on.
I hope you view my feedback as constructive Reply
latenightdog - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkWay harder to read and navigate. Previous site was fine. Why are you messing with loyal readers? Reply
random2 - Wednesday, March 13, 2013 - linkCongratulations Anand and staff. Site looks great. Big, bold and beautiful, kinda like my second girlfriend.
Not a complaint, but even with a monitors brightness turned down the white space can be a little overwhelming at times. I know I could turn it down even further, but then I couldn't see the buggers in the bushes in BF 3. Just a little off the 96 brightness would be great!
Thanks again for all the great things you have brought us and taught us over the years without resorting to pop-unders/ups and overs, and no auto sound or video files. It's been a great pleasure. :-) Reply
Beenthere - Thursday, March 14, 2013 - linkYour comment illustrates the differences viewers are actually seeing on screen and that we are not all seeing the same design.
Most folks were happy with the previous site design because it appeared proper and reasonable to the majority whereas the new design does not format or flow properly for many if not most people. AnandTech needs to resolve whatever issues are causing the wide variations in screen display for so many people and address the need for constant scrolling, conflicting sidebars, gray on gray test/bars, missing text in click boxes, etc. if they ever hope to retain or grow their audience - which is the primary reason for the site redesign. Reply
CeriseCogburn - Thursday, March 14, 2013 - linkI think the primary reason is they fall into the retarded lemmings profile they so desperately need to.
The web redesign hits at the same time every year, you can see the major sites all caving in to the go-arounds in a short time period. They're all retarded lemmings is the real answer. They spend the money to "feel good they are keeping up with the modern Jones".
It's as dumb as it gets.
If they wanted pure html 5 just recode for that - that's a simple answer, so that is NO EXCUSE. Reply
NeBlackCat - Thursday, March 14, 2013 - linkDont like it - harder to read on my smartphone due to more columns and the massive "more pipeline stories"..and who cares what happens on facebook or twitter. Or did I miss how to invoke the mobile site? Reply
CeriseCogburn - Thursday, March 14, 2013 - linkSo the verdict is it totally sucks, and yes it does. Reply
svizec - Thursday, March 14, 2013 - link2003 called, they want their design back. Seriously, this new redesign is so ugly and dysfunctional, I first thought I had a cache problem. It was even worse when I realized that you intended to make it look like this. This design update is a big step back. There is no excuse for producing such a mess in 2013. I suggest you consider hiring some talented people who understand how to make a well laid-out, responsive page that delivers relevant content to the users without making them scroll all over the place while simultaneously presenting them with huge areas of whitness. I am disappointed. Badly. Reply
kleinkinstein - Thursday, March 14, 2013 - linkWeb and data design is my business, and this is horrid! Look, feel, color, architecture, and flow is atrocious. Get your money back! For your sake I hope this "new look" isn't the byproduct of some "new strategy" and "new brand", because it typically always is. And speaking of...enough smartphone crap already! You're better than this...I think. If I hear Brian Klug on one more podcast I'll quit you as a follower. Reply
Gigaplex - Thursday, March 14, 2013 - linkThe redesign doesn't work on my HTC Legend. The browser just completely locks up when trying to load it, and won't load any site thereafter until I task kill it. This happens with the stock browser from Cyanogenmod 7, Dolphin and Opera. What on earth is the new site doing? Reply
jaquadro - Friday, March 15, 2013 - linkAfter using this new design for a few days now, I still find it far more difficult to navigate than the old design. Does your pipeline move fast enough to warrant being split up into multiple places -- breaking the flow of your main article feed in the process? Only during a few key events throughout the year, from what I've seen.
I'll keep visiting because of the quality of the content, but I will be doing so in spite of this new design, and with a new tinge of disgust. Reply
Haydon987 - Friday, March 15, 2013 - linkI have to mirror what a couple other people have already said. My HTC MyTouch 4G Slide (T-Mobile) cannot load this redesigned page. As with the other reports, my web browser locks up then shuts off. Reply
Almost2old - Friday, March 15, 2013 - linkLooks good! Very good! Reply
pandemonium - Friday, March 15, 2013 - linkIt looks clean, but I think that focus went overboard...it's too clean. I actually don't like visiting this site any more, because the home page is a mess. The tiling motif with a white background, to match Facebook or W8 or whatever, doesn't work very well here.
Keep it in a line, for easy to locate articles. Also, please put some sort of a backdrop on here. The white looks incomplete and as an afterthought. The brushed metal used behind the A in the article title would be perfect. Reply
phillyry - Saturday, March 16, 2013 - linktabs at the top of the page are harder to hit on iPhone Reply
jdburton - Saturday, March 16, 2013 - linkI find it nearly impossible to know what I'm looking at on the front page. There is way too much going on now. Reply
Shukla - Saturday, March 16, 2013 - linkWish in the site redesign there was a specific mobile version. With the screen dimension, I find it difficult to view on my iPhone chrome browser. Reply
alacard - Saturday, March 16, 2013 - linkI'm baffled. Honestly, i don't get it.
Go over to Arstechnica and compare the two views (list and uh, block i guess) and tell me honestly which one is easier to navigate/read/understand/follow.
If you answered "block" then really, please, go get your head examined because there is something wrong in there and you may need immediate surgery to stay alive.
Anand, please explain to me what the point of this modification is because i can't figure it out. It's a complete mess. It doesn't flow. It doesn't make any sense. It just looks like a movie ransom note with crazy letters and colors everywhere.
Look man, seriously, just because you can doesn't mean you should. Just because everyone else is doing it, doesn't mean you should. Just because some asshat Troy Maclure type web developer slimeball shyster comes whooshing into your offices with a catchy song and a PHD in bullshit and tries to sell you this ridiculous design doesn't mean you should buy into it.
You've been had. So pick up what's left of your dignity and for the love of all the is holy--change it back. Reply
Beenthere - Sunday, March 17, 2013 - linkI think a lot of you do not understand that what we are seeing are a variety of different designs on screen. It's obvious that some folks are seeing an acceptable design but others are not based on how the code is displaying be it with columns/rows, type font, color density, etc. I suspect that Anand and those responsible for the new design are themselves trying to figure out why the new looks appears so varied on different PCs and portables. I doubt that this is intentional. Once they determine what the issues are then they may be able to resolve many of them. For the time being many of us will not be coming to this site for awhile until Anandtech is able to correct the layout issues as it's too difficult to even read the articles. Reply
Martrox - Monday, March 18, 2013 - linkI've tried to live with this for a few days and, guys, you need to get some help here. This sucks. Reply
anandposter - Monday, March 18, 2013 - linkI somehow like the visual form of the new layout.
Still, I have one problem with it.
Could someone tell me, where I can actually read new articles now?
I check anand a few times per day and all the aggregated lists of nice articles from last weeks are kind of useless for me.
Since the layout changed I am not able to find a direct tracker of articles based on their date.
Is that what pipeline is for? Reply
Holly - Monday, March 18, 2013 - linkMy first impression when I opened AT few days ago was rechecking the address to see if it doesn't say "circustech.com"... Unfortunately it didn't... Then I hoped I would get used to new style... and well, I can't. The page was well readable, well arranged and easy to use. It's really hard to read now, navigation turns to be quite a headache and overall the experience is not good at all.
+1 to revert
P.S. White background doesn't help much too, after all this is not paper and you are using additive colour space, not subtractive, so making the background darker would be quite reasonable (especially if you don't have a screen that can switch between various profiles based on program running the active window) Reply
kgh00007 - Monday, March 18, 2013 - linkPlease bring back the old Anandtech, this is shit :-( looks terrible on my nexus 7, text is too small and the pictures are too small :-( why take a step backwards? I didn't think it was possible to turn me off Anandtech, but you have managed it! Reply
Oreoscrumbs - Tuesday, March 19, 2013 - linkI don't mind the redesign. I think it looks fine. I scanned the front page just like I always have, and I didn't notice anything missing. For those complaining about widescreen whitespace, ctrl-+ in Windows or cmd-+ in Mac zooms the site, and, on FireFox at least, keeps track on a site-by-site basis. That might also help with the font sizes some are complaining about. At work I am fortunate enough to have a second screen in a portrait orientation, so that is what I do most of my browsing on, to eliminate scrolling. The site looks fine on that screen, 1200 x 1920, with no issues. Sliding it to the landscape screen only means that I have to hotkey the zoom 4 times to fill the screen.
I really think most of the desktop users complaints are a non-issue, if people take a little time to make some adjustments. I also set my brightness at 30, so even a full white screen is less harsh on my eyes. Reply
Beenthere - Tuesday, March 19, 2013 - linkFrom personal experience testing on a variety of desktop and laptop PCs, I can tell you the issue is not user "adjustments", which is why I pointed out in my comment above that what some folks are seeing is not the same as what other folks are seeing, which makes you wonder why the obvious differences from from similar hardware and O/Ss. In addition adjusting the screen settings doesn't change the layout or significantly improve the type fonts and how they display, shaded boxes, cut-off text, etc. Reply
PCMerlin - Tuesday, March 19, 2013 - linkRevisiting this, it looks like the overall background has changed to a slight grey, rather than a full solid white. That seems to tone down the "in your face" brightness that was here initially.
I've also viewed the site on a 4:3 ratio monitor where the white space on the sides does not exist (I'm assuming that is the way it appears on the iPad and other tablets, too) and that also helps considerably in viewing the site.
Could you confirm that the overall background has changed, or it is just the screen I'm using to view it from? Reply
GreenLoco - Wednesday, March 20, 2013 - linkI can't put this off any longer, this redesign sucks ! Reply
risa2000 - Thursday, March 21, 2013 - linkAfter several days, I do not know anymore, what I have already read and what I did not. Completely lost in the page broken into incoherent areas with no easy way to follow. Reply
ghitz - Thursday, March 21, 2013 - linkI'm only checking AnandTech twice a week now with this crap layout, as opposed to twice a day. Is this what you guys hoped for? Reply
FH123 - Wednesday, March 27, 2013 - linkI was also a frequent reader and I agree. The previous design was more blog-like, with the articles strictly sorted by date and time. This was ideal to see what's new and pick the content I wanted to read. The new design seems inspired by bigger news outlets, but you're not one of those. If you were putting up dozens of new articles a day, it would make sense to pick highlights on the home page and generally organise the site in a more hierarchical fashion. But what you're about is a small volume of really high-quality articles. Listing them side by side is disorienting. Which was published first? Have I read it? Where's the new stuff? Is it sorted or do I have to hunt for it? What's a pipeline story and why should I care?
It's the big in-depth articles that are your forte and what I'm here for. Those are, naturally, fewer and less frequent, but the previous design had them, rightfully, front and center. Even though I don't think that has objectively changed much, the new design feels like it's cluttered with garbage. I think the use of serif fonts and perhaps too cramped line spacing may be contributing to that impression. A redesign is always bound to elicit criticism from people like me, because it takes time to get used to. Even so I feel there is something about the new fonts and font sizes that results in a very cluttered and unfocused look, where headlines compete with each other on an equal footing when they shouldn't. Reply
yourbestcritic - Friday, April 19, 2013 - linkI couldn't agree more. Well said! Reply
Harkonnen - Friday, March 29, 2013 - linkWhile I like the redesign it is causing a minor annoyance for me. Firefox will keep asking me for my master password with the dialog box anytime I click on a new page. Even though I am already logged in. I am thinking it is from Firefox automatically trying to login to Facebook or twitter, maybe Dailytech as well.
I wish I knew how to stop this. Reply
GullLars - Friday, March 29, 2013 - linkI am of the same general opinion, and also have a 2560x1440 resolution main screen.
I gave it a couple of weeks, and i have to say the static "print layout" is very sub-optimal.
It would be much better to have an alternative layout you could choose That put all the side-bar stuff like pipeline stories, Dailytech News (ad?), Facebook and Twitter on both sides of the article building outwards instead of underneath eachother.
Currently my best option for reading Anandtech is using my 2nd screen, a U2412M in portrait, but to do it i have to move the firefox window and cover the stuff i usually keep on that screen. Reply
phillyry - Sunday, April 07, 2013 - linkCould you please make it so that you don't need to scroll down to the bottom of a page in a review to jump to another section.
You should be able to do this from the top of the article / page. Reply
teiglin - Wednesday, April 10, 2013 - linkNot sure if anyone is still looking at these, but http://www.theonion.com/articles/websites-new-layo... has never been more relevant. Reply
yourbestcritic - Friday, April 19, 2013 - linkBland and corporate, you've sold out! Used to be the site's main goal was to provide intensely in depth analysis of products that always impressed in their comprehensive robustness but also were given full wide screen width promenant home page placement. Pipeline stories? Tweets? Facebook? Really??? They're more important than the actual substanative information that was this sites hallmark? How about more blinking advertising. Can't wait for the pop-ups. Like Ars Technica and Allmusic you're unique presentation of promoting intelligent content is getting buried in useless noise. Site's lost its sole and personality that conveyed a "less is more" philosophy where content was king produced by a singular, unique talent with a passion technology, investigation, writing and teaching. Reply
Cris M. - Thursday, June 27, 2013 - linkHi Anand,
I'm not sure if you changed something since March, but I really like the current design. Nice and clean.
Can you please tell me the name of the font you are using? thanks! Reply