The New Shiny Escapist

[PipPup]

I'm not crazy about the white; its pretty distracting. Also, I just find the whole first page a giant mush; a little too much clutter. My biggest problem though, is that I really miss the videos on the side of the front page. It was easy to find, easy to see, and it quickly showed me what videos were up and what I hadn't watched yet. (I really want that back). Other than that it seems fine, not a great, polished look but its fine.

 

[Buzz Killington_v1legacy]

My reaction:



I'm all for innovation and reinventing yourself, but seriously, after a while all the blank white space makes it like trying to read by the light of a thermite grenade. As for the front page, it feels all cramped and chaotic now. Points for effort, but the design needs some serious work still.

 

[Puddleknock]

Wow just skimming this tread and my eyes hurt a little.

Have to say I'm not a huge fan of the new layout but its not terminal, I'll just adapt. It's not as bad as the new BBC front page so that's something.

 

[ex2katana]

I like the new layout, but you need to fix that font. I love the font, but for some reason it's turning into an unreadable mess on my monitor.

 

[XDravond]

Hehe first less than a sec look "crap the browser messed up again" reloaded and went to another tab second thought NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO why? why? WHYYYY???? .... continued please let me have choice.... nope zero non...

What annoys me so you say?
ALL THE FRACKING WHITE!!!! please make an option at least for old color scheme blue!.
I do not understand what all this obsession with white is about that all site seem to have as lead word.
I would like my sites not black-dark but the blue color scheme Escapist had were great why not give the possibility of tweaking the site by the end-user? techreport.com has a (not perfect) but working system for light/dark & normal/wide.
Sure I know it's not technically white is fade in grey/white. and I don't like the light blue either make it darker. Yes I want it less "airy" (damn hippies, I like my smog, gritty, hard to find anything sites) ;-P

Would also not mind if the "news" section easier to see (higher up on the site or lower but wider...)
some kind of separation line/box between/around the top "featured"(the top 4 thingy) and the rolling list so it is easier to distinguish...

Otherwise I'm just annoyed since this is somewhere around 10th site that changes appearance completely in the past year or so... that I visit regularly...

So what I would like:

Please make a dark option!

 

[SonicWaffle]

Instead we got 'OMGFH TEH CHANGEZ R BAAAAD FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!!!!ONEONE111!'

Or more accurately, "one aspect of this change is making the site extremely difficult to read, please change that". The majority of posts I've seen - which I fully agree with - seem to be saying that the site redesign in general might be OK, but that the background is way too in-your-face.

People going "AAAARGH CHANGE" and people dismissing any legitimate grievance with "Pffft, they're just afraid of change" are pretty much two sides of the same coin

 

[TheBoulder]

I have to agree with a lot of people here; I don't like it. It's too bright and the popular threads box is slow as fuck. And why are you giving warnings to people who are complaining harshly, Escapist? So what if they're saying the new layout is shit? They have the right to speak they're minds, it's starting to look all 1984 up in this *****.

 

[tthor]

Dear god, the white is giving me serious eyestrain. Everything else I can put up with, but fix the god damn excess white!

 

[JokerboyJordan]

Change the blue to darker and use something on the borders to cover up the white other than an advertisement and it'll be okay.

Seriously though, the change is mediocre, I know I'll get used to it, but the old site with the old news bar and colour scheme was far more homely.
Like someone else said, it reminds me of facebook and that's not good.

Meh, I could've done better.

 

[PleasantKenobi]

The site is loading slow, and the forum is eating my posts. Accessing my messages on my profile took three attempts.

The look is nice, but I hope this is just jitters due to the sudden change.

 

[Furioso]

Anyone else having a huge issue with the text font being all blurry, I cannot enjoy this until it is fixed, anyone know of such a fix? (running firefox btw)

Edit: Everything is blurry, all the pictures, all the font, simply hard to look at, the one thing that I am positive that it isn't my computers fault however, is the white background, my god that is horrible, it now physically hurts to look at the escapist

 

[Esotera]

Personally I think you could have handled this better...i.e. notifying everyone of the change, and giving us the opportunity to give feedback, even if it was just on screenshots or something.

But anyway, raging isn't going to do anything, so here's some feedback, and I encourage everyone else to do the same with specific examples




Constructive criticism:



- When scrolling across the top menu with speed, all the drop-down menus merge into one, and it's really disorientating. I understand that this is probably designed with tablets in mind, but please don't forget that the majority of people here use desktops or laptops to browse.

- Live Preview is much much slower. With the old design a lengthy post took around 3s max. With what I've written so far, it's taking about 10-15s.

- The logo looks pretty disjointed with the rest of the menu; the clashing shades of blue don't help.

- The old forum buttons look TOTALLY out of place with the new design. You can't really have it both ways here...change the entire layout, or none of it. Half measures won't work.

- And you're probably sick of this but it's far, far too bright.

- I like the new forums bar (minus the scrolling thing), this will save me many minutes.

And last of all....




- I realise that these changes aren't just visual, and you've probably made some significant changes to the codebase as well...congratulations on the hard work, hopefully it'll make things a lot easier. Just please listen to the community - if you've made the site more modular, then adjusting the aesthetics to feedback like this should be a lot easier.

If you care about the escapist then please post something in a similar format to this!

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

Apart from me liking it or not (I definitely don't, it's flashy and confusing), there's something that bothers me even more:

it's buggy like hell and full of design mistakes! Stuff is overlapping to the extent that I can only see like 1/5th of some of the containers (especially on the main page). Also, stuff is not properly aligned everywhere, like someone was in a real hurry putting this together.

Also, this comment box is buggy (it's growing alot while I type and spaces disappear at the end of each line. Linebreaks sometimes disappear).

Some of the colors are so off that you can't read the text because of the background. There's more buttons than content. The comments text is in the tiniest font ever. The ratio between page element sizes is totally weird everywhere. The main navigation design is a joke. I could go on for ages.

I'm a professional webdesigner and if I had delivered something like that my customers would've sent me home crying. Just sayin' ...

This. I'm about to attach some pictures, because they'll tell the story a lot better than words can. Note that this is on a good load; I had a bad load where not only were things overlapping, but the pictures were all way zoomed in on one small portion of the image, making it look like the textures in Quake 3 with the PCMIPS setting pushed all the way to the low detail end. Basically, the site is buggy as all get out; my monitor is a 16:9, 1366X768 monitor, and everything is squashed to the point you'd think I was trying to view it in 800X600. What's more, I agree with the people complaining about the new color scheme; the forums look like someone added avatars to Gamefaqs, while the front page looks like iOS barfed all over the front page of Gamefaqs. I really like the new menu system, but everything else needs serious work.

Spoiler: Here are some pictures to demonstrate what we are talking about with certain things being covered up

 

[BabySinclair]

My main quip is that it is taking longer to load pages.

 

[Folji]

I know you designed it to look "open", you just wrote so yourself, but the front page just makes me think "loose". People are probably gonna stop noticing it as soon as they get used to the new layout, but whenever I look at it I can't help but feel that the components aren't anchored or organized in any way. The old layout had a sense of structure that the new one just lacks.

 

[Scorcherr]

Phew, the bugs one the main page have gone away and the page loads alot faster. Seems like some server hiccups.

I don't think I'll be reading much comments with that font, my eyes are already burning.

By the way: try to access the "latest" and "popular" selections in the main menu under "Videos" ... without the menu closing on you because you accidentally skipped over the edge of it.

And why is everything up there so awkwardly cramped when there's so much space because of the (unreadable) tiny font? *claustrophobia kicking in*

 

[GundamSentinel]

Aaaaah! The goggles, they do nothing! My eyes!

*Ahem*

Other than that (I'm actually wearing sunglasses now), it looks okay. Still a little unstructured/cluttered perhaps (some borders would remedy both this and a bit of the glare), and perhaps a bit too Facebook-ish, but I'll get used to it. I just miss my bar that linked to the shows.

 

[MelasZepheos_v1legacy]

More readable? It is literally hurting my eyes. I look at this new design for about a minute, and I start getting a headache. My eyes begin to ache and I can feel that nice dull pain right at the back of the eyeball. If you wear glasses you'll know the one. It was the first warning sign that you needed to have your eyes checked.

No other website, book, movie, videogame, or piece of computer soft- or hard- ware has ever caused me to have this reaction. The Escapist has beaten out taking Ectasy in the list of 'things which gave me headaches and made my eyes hurt.'

The design is painful in the most literal sense of the word. Now I know that this probably falls into the old 3D argument of 'well only 20% of users suffer headaches' or something, but in my opinion, when you have a design that causes discomfort, fire the designer and try again, that's certainly what we'd do at my job.

In other news, if you don't hear from me until the site is redesigned, now you all know why.