The New Shiny Escapist

[Combustion Kevin]

can we have an option where we can change color layouts?

like, different color headers or background.

 

[M4t3us]

All this white is killing my eyes, I'm a night person, I'm used to dim lighting and dark rooms and this white kills me, I had to tone down the brightness of my LCD just so I could even read!
If you want to make this the final layout at least offer us some options to select a darker color scheme, with a black or dark blue background and a white font. Please.

 

[lRookiel]

Just put it back to the old colour scheme please, much more easy on the eyes, Plus another complaint I have is that the text on the menu's at the top and bottom all look rather fuzzy or pixelated whatever you wanna call it.

As someone has mentioned before it looks a bit like Facebook and its not a good look im afraid. I'm sure everyone would be happy with the new layout if the colours were just back to normal.

 

[userwhoquitthesite]

snip for competence

So, you've made it both harder to navigate, and a terrible color scheme that a high school webmastering student wouldn't use that causes eye-strain at at least double the speed of the old site.


good thinkin', guys

 

[Abedeus]

This looks as bad as the new Youtube.

 

[Bravo 21]

Eh, after a few hours, it think i'll live, after all, I never came here because the homepage was pretty

 

[Prince Regent]

Oh this is new... My first thought was that there was something wrong with the server and that the site wouldn't load properly.

Now I'm fine with most of it, but please change the background from white in something else.

Edit: Okay that and change the font or something. I cant read the smaller words in the news section.

 

[Stalydan]

Oh god! If you were aiming for shiny then you got it. It's practically blinding. It feels colder despite being a much brighter colour scheme.

A word of warning would have been nice or asking people what they would like changed and left the same rather than just giving us something and then saying "Here you go! Have fun trying to navigate it". And that's a serious concern you should have here. The old site had your sidebar in news articles and videos that you find the top shows and comics you have on here. Now they're at the top and don't have the link straight to this week new video. So if a new video was to arrive the day after by say Yahtzee and you wanted to watch MovieBob's Big Picture from Yesterday that you missed, good luck finding it on the homepage, it probably won't be there.

Also, going back to news articles, I don't know what screens you were testing these things on but wow it's hard to read them. They're extremely tiny compared to the previous ones. Also the Facebook comments. Do you even use those? I do. They're absolute eyesores to read now. They've been made to squashed together that it's a wonder anyone can use them without pressing their face against the screen.

Please adjust these things. It's a pain to get around the site now. This isn't because "Oh my god, it's a redesign! What do I do?!" but more "This website is way more cluttered now than I've ever seen it before". Fix those points I mentioned and you've got a perfectly fine site. Otherwise it's just... well it's a mess is what it is.

 

[12th_milkshake]

I don't say all that much on escapist many of you probably never seen me around but being a daily member this has got me stirred. So rather than ***** and complain. I give you a poem that my heart did proclaim. At least that adds some uniqueness to usual complaints.


Ode to Escapist (Twas the night before christmas style)

Twas 15 nights before Christmas, when all through escapist,
Almost every user was stirring, even the mods,
The new website was put up without even a care,
In hope that the users would not go in despair.

The users were face-palming with their hands on the head,
While visions of the old site danced in their heads.
And the escapist website on my monitor and I in my chair,
Wondered how the fuck did this get on air?

When on the forums there rouse such a clatter,
I sprang to the comments to see what was the matter.
Clicking to the forum at least that was a flash,
It might be the same but still not the best.

The flashing white on the new website shown,
Fogged the features and objects below,
When all of a sudden a box seemed to appear,
It was the article box and my oh dear!

With things clutter and not so quick,
I knew in a moment there had to be some dick,
More powerful and evil than any man that came,
As he whistled and screamed, Haha your cries are in vain!

Now Sally! now, Ron! now, David and Rickerson!
On cue! On, call! all night we be getting a-fixen.
From top to bottom to the large and the small!
Now hurry god damn it let's fix this issue all!

As the old site gone the users did sigh,
When they meet with obstacles, right on the fly,
So up to the top that the users did knew,
With hopes that the links at least worked the same too.

And then in flash something hit the escapist roof,
The running and pulling as each man went in a booth.
As I looked about, and was scrolling around,
Down the ladder the men came a bound.

Dressed in the quickest ware from their head to their foot,
Their clothes full of nerdy references that talked about loot.
A bundle of laptops and supplies hung on their backs,
As they took out the things out of the packs.

Thier eyes full of furry and not so merry!
Their cheeks flesh from the cold, honestly it looks scarry!
As they armed their tools like a hunter's bow,
the process was starting but it would be oh so slow.

They sat down at the desk biting their teeth,
As the smoke from their anger could lit up some beef.
Their faces stone cold and full of jelly,
As they turned on their PCs and rubbed their bellies.

Tired and over worked they hated their self,
and I feel for the workers, can't smite them myself!
A reassuring statement went off in their heads,
Soon gave know that their night was dead.

Simple words were said and they got to their work,
And starting to program and hate the big jerk.
And wishing they reconsidered the site that did pose,
And hoping the fixes would soon arose.

With that, the team went on with not even a whistle,
in hopes that soon they could sort out this missile.
But still they sat and complained as the boss went out of sight,
"This shit should have not launched, now it fucked up our night!"


My actual reaction to the new site:

Open chrome click escapistmagazine.com bookmark
In a daze look at the homepage
Do a double take
Spit out my hot coco
WTF happened here!
Desperation kicks in, click around to find what used to been
Realizes everything is fucked up
Pray to the gods of skyrim that this is some type of joke

Look I can be pretty forgiving because the website industry is my professional forte. However for a major site that is geared to a gaming community I'm not sure who the hell thought this would be a good design. This new piss poor design makes escapist actually look like there is less content. I loved the old design it was easy to navigate and had its own personality. Now? Well now it looks like start-up gaming site Z.

This brings me to a quick story, we were commissioned for a job of a high profile company that wanted to "update" their website. The CEO had his own terrible ideas which we told him to all hell that it was extremely bad idea to change the website in such a way. However the customer is always right we conceded and made the changes, launched the new website and they lost so many sales that they literally went out of business.

I'm not sure if this is the same here but sometimes you just need to look back and say hey programmer A or programming team A that we hired are professional maybe I should like them handle it. When people outside of the industry step in with their tastes well you pretty much get what you see now.

The homepage needs a redesign if you end up keeping this design and the pages of articles will need some color why not just keep that gradient through the whole page why just the outside? Too much white, at one point web 2.0 was the new thing now it's just absolutely annoying. In my eyes you guys took a step down in design not up.

The words from a humble web developer
who lost his way, on a site he frequently visited everyday.

you sir get cookies. simply brillant.

 

[Warachia]

Thank you so much for adding backgrounds now, at least it's MUCH easier on the eyes, now all you have to do is clean up the front page and the three boxes right below this comments section (light blue on white doesn't work).
For some reason this reminds me of a bethesda launch title. Horrible at first, then fixed later.

 

[RedEyesBlackGamer]

Thank you so much for adding backgrounds now, at least it's MUCH easier on the eyes, now all you have to do is clean up the front page and the three boxes right below this comments section (light blue on white doesn't work).
For some reason this reminds me of a bethesda launch title. Horrible at first, then fixed later.

There are different backgrounds? How do I change mine?

 

[Woem]

I'm curious which problem The Escapist was trying to solve with this redesign. I haven't seen any complaints from the users, anywhere, regarding this for example: "But it simply was not proving enough, as our home page grew packed, even cluttered, with great new videos, features and breaking news." This is not something that the Escapists wanted fixed.

I believe this is culprit: "We needed better tools to manage these areas," rather than this: "to help users discriminate between types of content." My advice would have been to fix the back-end, and to keep the front-end the same. The front-end didn't need fixing.

 

[2xDouble]

I don't hate it. There's definitely some neat features here, especially those mouse menus, very cool. I'm a little put off by the white background, though. It feels really sterile and inorganic compared to the old layout. It looks like you're leaving a lot of empty space for advertising in the middle of the page as opposed to simple margin banners. I'm not sure how I feel about that, but early polls show leaning towards "against".

I miss the separate lists of all the latest videos. I know they're there under the mouse menu, but I like to see them when I log in... perhaps if there was a way to pseudo-customize the site, have a blank window or widget space that I could assign to show me specific information or lists on the front page, or a function like the news ticker, cycling through the newest new features... something like that.

I'm also not sure about jumbling up the news, features, and videos into the same space on the main page. It worked in the old layout because the videos were always at the top and to the right (slightly redundant, I know) and the news and articles were in the middle, but now they... well, they feel jumbled up. There's not much to draw me to the other feature pages there. I do like the news feed taking a more prominent position, though, and the "ticker" banner in the middle is a nice touch.

Not sure if this is related to the new layout or not, but it took a long time to log in. A note or something that indicated the Facebook login and the site login were now different features might have been nice, to prove that it wasn't just the site refusing to log me in again. And it wouldn't accept my password when I did figure that out... but that's more of a tech support problem.

I'll say again, I don't hate it. I don't particularly like it as it is, but I'm willing to give it a chance. ...but that pure white background has got to go. heh.

 

[JamesStone]

I really don´t like it. I mean, it´s not bad, but the older design was better. Why repairing what isn´t broken? I never heard anyone complain about the design of the old Escapist. Not to mention the extreme brightness and shininess are killing my eyes.

 

[Grouchy Imp_v1legacy]

I can live with it. I think there's a large amount of reactionary "IT'S NOT THE SAME AS BEFORE!" going on with some people - I've spent the last 10 minutes roaming about the site and a lot of the new features are very intuitive to use and to navigate around. Yeah it's different, but different doesn't mean bad.

Although it does apparently mean very, very bright.

 

[LetoTheTyrant]

oww, too bright, it hurts my eyes. Plus the font, especially the when used for video titles is just plain ugly, it's far too tall and way, way too narrow.

All the 'streamlinning' stuff, yeah ok, don't really care or notice any real useful change, just that everything's been moved. If anything, been made worse. Before, I could see the list of video series on the right side bar, with the title of the last episode. Now I have to go up to the top of the page, and find them in a drop down box, which shows only the name of the series.

And yes, it's possible that loads of social network stuff has been added, but I personally couldn't care less.

Previously I used to come here for videos; and the news and odd amusing thread via the forums. Now I think I will restrict my use to just the video series (ZP, The Big Picture & Feed Dump), for the sake of my eyes if nothing else.

 

[Mau95]

I thought I was on the Spore site, which I haven't been to for months... Meh, too white.

 

[Cheeseman Muncher]

OH NOES. A FREE SERVICE I AM NOT REQUIRED TO PAY FOR HAS CHANGED WITHOUT TELLING ME AGAIN.

I like it. =3 Boxes are nice.

EDIT: Though now I've had a couple of minutes, the white has started to stab the back of my eyes a bit. A slightly more off-white background (slightly grey) would definitely be much more readable.

 

[Ed130 The Vanguard]

Darkening the background, the blue link text and increasing the size of main bar text (news, Features) would help allot.

The main toolbar is a big improvement over the last one, but the popular forum posts box is a loss for me, you can't keep it set to browse past day only.

 

[Tragedy's Rebellion]

Like everyone else said, it's just too bright and it's not easy on the eyes. I thought the page wouldn't load properly when I first saw it. The font on the main bar at the top is pixelated as well.