Daniel Dvorkin's Journal: Layout changes

Is it my imagination, or does every single change /. makes to the layout make the site uglier, more wasteful of screen space, and harder to read?

Taco et al.: Please, for the love of God, stop. Stop screwing around with a perfectly good, functional layout. If you want to offer users choices of "themes" the way LJ etc. do, then great, but make it a choice. If there's some compelling reason to change things, let us know -- but I really don't believe there's any reason at all for the latest change to the way comments are displayed; it's purely an aesthetic decision, which happens to be a really bad one. Just ... stop.

No doubt!

[BWJones]

I am having a helluva time reading threads and am not enjoying the experience...

Re:

[nahdude812]

I'm not a huge fan of the aggressive use of rounded corners for action buttons / links - they don't look like buttons or links any more, they look like message windows.

But that said, I do like the nesting borders, I think it makes it harder to follow deep threads. Also when you're viewing a comment page [slashdot.org], it no longer looks like children of the comment you're viewing are actually siblings of that comment.

The new inline comment form (vs a few days ago) no longer fills up the available browser width on Firefo

It was distracting at first...

[Shadow Wrought]

But I've gotten used to it for the most part now. My main lament is that they spend all this time improving stuff that doesn't need improving, instead of working on things like Search or Firehose.

accidental improvement

[StrawberryFrog]

Today's look isn't that bad, nice rounded buttons with CSS mouseover. It still feels like an accidental improvement from designers stumbling in the dark.