The New Shiny Escapist

[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.

 

[Fiz_The_Toaster]

I rather like the design, I saw this on Friday and I was impressed.

I have two small grips though, one, it takes forever to load a page, and the other is, dear GOD the white is hurting my retinas! It probably doesn't help that it's raining and super grey outside, but ouch!

Other than that, I like the design, cheers to you guys for creating it!

 

[hoockhand]

Liked the old layout more..

 

[Dosbilliam]

Not sure why it needed to be changed.

It didn't. The old site was good enough and aside from what I can see on the bottom about the suggested articles and stuff, it seems to be an exercise in futility. The FB comments are completely borked up due to other suggested articles that seem to be somewhat relevant but in no way interesting. Personally, I would prefer them changing back to the old design, or at least adding an option to change back.

 

[Soviet Heavy]

Make the borders Blue and I'll be fine.

 

[Fusioncode9]

It's so white... Plus its been running pretty slow for me.

 

[NikolaiK]

aaaaaaaaaaaah aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah aaaaaaaaaaaaaah my poor eyes
How can I lurk in the forums when the design makes my soul vomit?
And where have all the latest videos gone?
And why.... just why
I may have to leave the escapist as I am a hidebound traditionalist
also to reiterate points made before - laggy, too much white and nice subtle use of massive adverts everywhere which ruin the way the site looks

 

[tthor]

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.

everything he said. And tho it does look kinda remind me of facebook, it somehow looks worse;

 

[seraphy]

I think that shiny part is worst of it actually. This new layout is too bright. Please please tone it down a notch at least. It actually hurts my eyes.

 

[Pinstar]

I'm sure you guys worked very hard on this. And maybe, just maybe, this just a natural aversion to change. But the longer load times and the design?

 

[SovietSecrets]

Its kind of meh to be honest. Just huge boxes everywhere and way too much white.

 

[Dimitriov]

I am sorry, but this new interface is incredibly poorly designed. There is no separation visually between different news articles and videos on the front page. It's confusing and unappealing: it is just a mess.

Frankly it looks like the web page hasn't loaded properly.

The text actually seems less readable too.

PLEASE change it back, for your own sake.

This seems like one of those instances where the best of intentions went very awry. I assume whoever worked on it got too caught up in what they were doing and became unable to take a step back and notice just how BAD what they had created was.


Honestly, I don't think I can look at this on a regular basis, as it is really kind of painful. If it stays this way then I won't be frequenting your website. That's not some stupid ultimatum, or attempt to boycott, or even me just whining. It's a simple truth that reflects the quality of what has been created here, and you should probably be made aware of it.