Change is good. It gives your designers something to do when they aren't searching the inter-tubes for porn.

I actually really like the changes... so yeah, I guess I have no business replying to the bitch and moan thread. Feel free to ignore me. :)

Actualy, I like it.

I hate it, mostly. Tons of wasted space on the left and right sides of the screen. The 'Line Out' button atop the Slog page is too far left of the 'Music and Nightlife' qualifier that should be directly below it. The "Community' box on the Slog page does not have an orange border on the right side or bottom, and it looks sloppy. Grey and white, grey and white, grey and white = yuck, so try some colour. The "Today in the Stranger' box at the top of the Slog page is cut off on the right side. "Top Stories" on the home page is too much like CNN, and how can you have the same top stories for a week? Top Stories and Features are not synonymous, and some of those Features are the best I've ever read. In general, the homepage layout is an improvement. Why do I care so much? Because The Stranger online is my best connection to news in the USA.

Mrs. Jarvie @ 4:

Thanks for your response. Could you tell me what operating system and browser you use. And whether you might have your browser font size set to something larger than the default.

I've got better things to do than bitch about minor changes, which is what these are.

When I open comments (Windows XP, Mozilla), there is tons of blank space on the top of the page, and I Have to scroll down to see the comments.

Seriously, I figured there was something wrong with my browser. It's weird, I was looking through the ten or so Sherman Alexie articles on the Sonics when suddenly my display seemed to go nuts from one page to the next. I didn't think much of it at the time, as I'm used to things going strange here and there.

Whatever, though. It's your site. If you want to make it less readable ... that's up to you.

I would be fine with this if it wasn't just completely wrong. Look at any blog - it's either centered or off to the RIGHT. Slog isn't written in freaking Hebrew or Arabic, this makes no visual sense.

+1 on the hater (or at least the technical difficulty) side. Under Firefox 2.0.0.13 on Win XP, there is a large chunk of whitespace between the banner and the Slog article. The comments themselves spill outside the middle column and into the margins. I do run the NoScript extension and thought at first that this was a JavaScript problem, but the problem persists after enabling all the various scripts and reloading.

I like the new design, but one thing: I used to be able to just get the Visual Arts posts from the Slog on the Visual Arts page and now I have to slog through the whole Slog just to find 'em... That sucks.

It's. Poetry.

Looks good, but since you ask, here are some design nerd complaints:
-The leading is too tight on the comments text.
-The drop shadow under SLOG seems out of place. I actually thing SLOG could get slightly bigger and fill its space better.
-You might as well make the text above SLOG images, rather than HTML text, since they will always be there. Then you can match the type on the nav. Right now there are at least three sans serifs happening.
-The placement of "News & Arts" is weird. Is it even necessary? If so, align to the bottom.
-Italicizing News & Arts and Music & Nightlife is a little 710-KIRO... maybe just regular text.
-The LineOut button, though aligned with a few things, is too close to the banner to its right. I would move it left and align to the yellow box inside the house banner above it.
-You don't need "Search" to the left of the search field and it will look better with the field aligned left.
-"Today in the Stranger" is stacked a little awkwardly. Maybe it could be tighter.
-Could you make the drop-downs on the nav images instead of HTML text?

The layout is solid, lots of stuff working very well. Just some fine-tuning. Someone buy the design team a sixer.

Don't really like it, but that could be because I was used to the old layout, kind of like when your supermarket starts changeing where they stock the pickles.

The old layout seemed more compact, this one seems to spread out forever.

Also why doesn't "Get Your War on" pop out anymore?

For that matter, how come you don't post all of your comics?

Dog Barf.

on toast.

I do keep my browser set to show larger font sizes, for readability reasons. You need to have a design that works for people who do this.

Enormous chunk of white space above the "today in the stranger" box, then all the links in the right side bar, from the stranger "flickr pool" downward display under all the posts. Mac OS 10.5.2, Safari 3.1.

This looks horrible.

The layout may just be the worst ever. Small font, GOBS of whitespace on the right, and the stupid blinky 'Community' box up top.

Totally spooge-errific.

And the talk-bubble conceit is cloying.

Please lose this thing, and the warped ego behind it.

comments are centered - god it is hard to read them

takes the WHOLE screen

what are you doing

it worked fine, improving graphics is OK by making it less functional is stupid

I used to come her five six times a day, not so much any more, yuk

why are you tampering with what was working fine

Too many ads on the right side of the screen...

The new layout is completely broken in Camino. It's not the most common browser, but a fairly large number of Mac users (including me) use it.

firefox 2.0.0.12, Winxp pro, and the top full page of slog is filled with an ad, a lot of whitespace, and a menu on the left. Horrible. I have to scroll down to get to the first story. Centered comments are also difficult to read.

I'm going to go with the "hate it" column on this one... there's about 2 inches of wasted space on either side of the page (using explorer) and I feel all turned around. Everything being on the right makes me feel like I woke up on the underside of the bed and then walked on my hands to work.

Ahh, now I'm seeing it how other people are describing. I like it, except the centered comments.

The right hand column is too wide. It distracts from the rest of the page. It's rather wasted space since the content is already available via links from numerous other places on the page. I find the horizontally scrolling "Community" box to be really distracting.

Too much content "below the fold" as they say.

On the other hand, I like the overall clean design and color scheme.

and now that's fixed. I love it!

Maybe all you haters should get iPhones, 'cos SLOG shows up loverly on such. Just sayin'.

And I like the cute word bubbles in the comments. Fun!

Hip-hop hooray.

This thing is a spread out, unreadable mess on Mac Firefox 2.0.0.13. I'm not even sure if all of the css is loading.

The left-hand orientation *is* really weird. Whether this is just a case of not being used to it or whether there's a real reason out there why everyone else skews things to the right side, I don't know.

Otherwise, it's not so different that I can notice anything worse or much better than the old layout. The top nav bar is kinda handy.

Well, now the layout seems to be fixed (Safari 3.1, Mac OS 10.5.2). However, the research I've read says that most people find navigation sidebars easier to read on the left, not the right.

honestly i think it's a marginal improvement on the old site, if that. some things are better, some things are worse (what's up with the search box on it's own giant bar at the top?), but i think all things considered it's about the same.

I leave Slog for one day and this shit happens? This is beyond hideous. Somebody sucks at their job.

Whatever. Slog still takes waaaaay too long to load in Firefox either way.

Goddamn this shit to hell. Whoever is responsible for this had better keep it hush hush. This is embarrassing. I've seen geocities pages that look better than this.

Ah, dumped my cache. Now it looks to be working. Whew!

Ha ha ha -- "whoever designed it". So funny; as if someone would mean for the site to look like this on purpose. It's obviously broken. I'm sure they'll fix it once the staff starts arriving for the day around noon or so.

Too bad this came a few days too early for April Fool's Day...

WHAT THE FUCK!!??!!

This is the biggest cluster fuck on the internet!!! CHANGE IT BACK!!! Or I vote for McCain!!!!! or worse I WILL VOTE FOR NADER!!!!!!

Why is everything on the left? This sucks. I fear change. Turn it back. The other crap you did is tolerable, but this wrong side thing just looks weird.

I'm working in Mac Firefox 2.0.0.12

Some comments:

•Does the search really need it's own bar? •Seems like the orange menu items should lign up with the community box- but they don't.
•Looks odd having borders with three different line weights all over the page.
•The side ads and community Flash animation are overpowering the content... tone them down.
•I like drop downs, but it does look a bit 2.0 and WAY too clean- isn't the Stranger an alt-weekly with a style all it's own? This webpage doesn't reflect that.

That is all.

I like it fine. It's kind of cool that you can just make your window skinny and pan all the way to the left to get all the ads off the screen, instead of having to block them. Now if there were user accounts and threaded comments, that would be the 'Eiffel DNA' of design upgrades.

When I got to slog this morning, I too thought my browser had issues. Then I reloaded and it's a bit disconcerting but if it loads right THE FIRST TIME, then who am I to complain? But centering the text on the comments section is just plain awkward and hard to read, especially when you're looking for the second line of a comment. Icky.

Ew. Super-ew. Change it back and look at more porn, please.

Oh, now that's odd. When I accessed comments from the main slog, all the comments were centered and it sucked to read them, but after I posted a comment, things were left-aligned and easy to read and the whole page looked different. You guys really need someone who knows how to set up your website for different browsers and platforms.

Unless the intent is to get people to post comments all the time.

I'm not feeling it. I don't like the left hand orientation and all the white space. Feels more difficult to read. Please change it back.

Idaho @ 43: This sounds like it might be a caching issue, some of which are inevitable after a change like this. The comment threads should looks the same before and after posting. What browser/platform are you using? We do of course test in the major combinations, but we can't test them all.

Thanks!

I figured it out. Instead of *paying* someone to find all the problems with your new layout, you're letting *us* do it and couching it in terms that suggest you might actually care about our input.

Cute.

Ack!! I fear change, but once I found the giant "Slog" button, all was well again.

All I had to do was dump my cache and go give my boil a touch o' the ten-penny nail while the old machine restarted. No bigs. I like it.

Actually, maybe I spoke too soon - this does come up a little faster than the last version, which took for-fucking-ever to load and render.

I'm using Firefox 2.0.0.13 on a mac 10.3.9 and I never clean out my cache. Your redesign should include an auto-clean for people like me.

By the way, everything seems to be working fine now.

Also agree that for whatever reason, the page renders sooner (under firefox anyhow) than it used to. bravo!

I like how it changes each time I visit. Keep it up!

Obama says we got more important things to worry about than what Slog looks like.

It looks fine, Geesh.

it looks like a default myspace page (note: [since you have no design sense] that is BAD)

at least kill that damned drop shadow on 'SLOG'

I think a lot of people are complaining about bugs as if they were flaws in the actual intended design? Because everything looks fine to me...

It's a little jumbley, but I can deal. It is faster. I really don't like the cutesy comment balloons, though.

i like it, actually. the speech bubbles on the comments page are a little silly.

it's definately better than the eiffel tower redo.

comments still take for fucking ever to post...anything we can do about that?

Ah, here's a major bug: it doesn't remember me anymore. Name, Email address, URL don't get saved. I like being remembered.

Yuck. What is this left-aligned nonsense? Fnarf stole my words re: cutesy comment balloons, too. Yuck.

This new slog layout doesn't do a damn thing to fix the fact that I am still drunk at work this morning. It must die.

I've always wanted to see my comments appear in a dialog bubble. Sort of cements the concept of my life as a cartoon.

I leave Slog for one day and this shit happens? This is beyond hideous. Somebody sucks at their job.

Seeing what blockquotes look like because I'm obsessed with them.

I like the new design! But I'll let you know when I see my blockquote. The comment preview page is garbled.

Good god thank you for updating the style. Reflects much better on you guys from people coming here from the interwebs who don't already know how awesome the Stranger is

Oh no, please bring the colored box blockquotes back!

Well if I'm going to have to put up with this, might I suggest a color besides white? It covers 99.9% of the page. My eyes are on fire.

Anything gunmetal or gray will do. But this solid white is killing me. And the Stranger has a duty to please me. (As do all of you.)

I'm not a big fan of the cutesy balloons, but overall it looks okay. The one thing I dislike though is that the tile of slog posts and their category all run together with the same font. To me it looks like: "Housekeeping Change It Back!" with nothing distinguishing the "Housekeeping" from the "Change It Back"

Hey y'all-

looks fucking awesome.

I'm on an Asus Eeepc (linux) and late last night it looked like shi-it but today it looks georgous.

And my little eeepc is a tough one!

Cool!!!!! That's what I call service!

I dislike the white space at the edges. I prefer a continual grey or the lines that were there before. It makes my eyes weird out when I'm trying to read. Thanks!

Ooh, I'm remembered now. Cool.

Next problem: the font for people's names ("Posted by") is too small or too tight or just too bold -- "elenchos" looks like "dendos", and some of the more complicated ones look like Amharic.

And that yellowish blockquote box looks diseased.

(I'm using Firefox 2.0.0.12 on WinXP with my monitor flipped to portrait instead of the usual landscape)

The left-align of Slog is challenging, I liked the visual buffer of stuff along the left column. Now the new content seems diminished in importance somehow when it is really takes the same amount of screen real estate as it did before. When I naturally look to the middle of the screen I'm faced with the right side of the content which is often blank space, the stupid blogroll and an ad. I have to make myself look to the left to find the start of the posts.

The "Don't Miss Nuthin'" box actually hides what used to be a really awesome feature that was very intuitive. The fact you need to teach people how to use that space with a little animation is telling. I clicked on the box to see what the new version is like and nothing happened, then realized that Firefox had blocked the popup that my click had tried to create. After I allowed the popups, I was taken to a new tab with a HUGE layout (meaning lots of white space) that was only for music as opposed to being able to search theater, readings, movies AND music. This has broken something that I used to use quite a bit and that had shown The Stranger was about all the performing arts rather than just music.

The scrolling Community thing ends up hiding a lot of the content it's trying to display since I'm not staring at it long enough to see all the content it has to scroll through. I didn't even realize it was scrolling until I saw a comment to that effect since I hadn't stayed long enough to watch it move.

The comments is really where I feel it breaks down though. The thought bubbles are gay, something I'd only expect to see in a teenager's bulletin board. The comments only have two ads, at the top, so when I scroll down a comments page with lots of posts there is a ton of disconcerting blank space on both sides of the center column. It feels desolate. Also, the "posted by" line at the bottom of each post or comment is smaller than the comment text and is in a hard-to-read italicized font. I have to squint to read who wrote the comments or posts. It used to be easy to tell if a name was clickable and now it is far less so. Finally, the comment entry area at the bottom seems bigger than it needs to be, and somehow clunkier. Increasing the font size once to be able to read the byline on the comments makes the comment entry box text GARGANTUAN.

I'm sorry but I don't really see any positive improvement, the site doesn't seem easier to use than it was, just different and in some ways far worse. I wish it were otherwise.

Fantastic. LOVE IT. I hopped online this morning, loaded SLOG and, well, my life changed instantly. Such is the power of good page composition and comment bubbles.

Seriously congrats to, uhm, I bet Corianton was involved...right? I knew it.

@72: describing something derogatorily as "gay". Oh, yes, that will get the people here to pay attention to you.

I think the general Slog layout is better, personally, here on my work computer running some form of IE. It looks less clunky and loads faster. I prefer grey to beige. The left-align isn't throwing me out of orbit. Generally, it's good enough that after a blink of thinking "hey, this looks different!" I don't have any real thoughts on it.

I'm using Firefox 3 beta 4, and it's working fine for me. I find the "Community" thing really distracting, though.

This looks really weird on Firefox and wastes a lot of space, but then, so does SLOG.

It also seems not to "remember" things like URLs.

My BlackBerry isn't 100% wild about it, but then again, it's not 100% wild about much of anything. Lots of browser time-outs this morning, though - what's up with that?

I don't have any new complaints, but I'll still list them anyway:
-Too white.
-Left alignment is not pleasurable.

Blockquotes are ugly.

Couldn't we have been warned this was coming?

@72 - Re: the "Don't Miss Nuthin'" thing. That's there merely to point people who were used to our old Event search widget to our new search. Since this functionality has moved, we wanted to point people who were looking for it to the new spot.

The one you see now goes to the Music Listings simply because it's the Music version of that little promo. From the Music Listings search, you can get to all the other (we hope much improved) Theater, Art, Performance, and Movie listings from the links in the blue "Find" bar. These searches are all also available from the main navigation.

Hrmph. Comments are harder to read now. I'm unwilling to up the font size of all of my browsing just to make slog comments easier to read. They may be the same size as before, but they're much harder to read in the sans serif font. Poopie.

I agree that there is too much white space all around. The old background, while beige and boring, was more attractive and easier on the eyes.

I really liked having the Arts/Food search box the way it was, but I could probably live with the current implementation.

Speech balloons on the comments are not terrible, but does give it a more childish appearance.

The scrolling Community thing is annoying and useless. Like many web surfers, I've trained my brain to ignore animated banners and such. I'll never look at it long enough for it to be any use.

Minor thing, but why does the search box say "Search" on both the left and the right of it? Also, having it there all by itself seems like a waste of space. Couldn't you work it into the right column or something?

Having the "Archives, Categories, RSS Feed, Slog Tip?" above the SLOG logo looks sloppy and takes attention away from it. The "News & Arts" thing looks like an afterthought.

The "Today in the Stranger" doesn't render correctly for me (Windows XP/Firefox).

The thought bubbles are gay, something I'd only expect to see in a teenager's bulletin board.

I agree, please keep the thought bubbles!! ^_^

You're forcing us to click one more time to get to music/movie/restaurant listings, rather than have the search box handy on every page? Wouldn't be such a problem if loading time was instantaneous, but the database is chugging, and the extra click or two adds a ton of wait time and makes me want to seek out other sites' local searches instead.

The drop-downs (Food, Music, Film, etc) at the top of each page are wasted in their current form. Why not have links to individual weekly articles on these? For example, in music, it'd be great to have these boxes filter results into Up&Coming, Columns, and so on. The whole point of a great UI is that it reduces the number of clicks, and that's not happening here. Easy to forget while designing that the end user is suffering through loading times that your internal Internet connection might not notice.

The white on the outer portion of the entire page looks bad on large monitors. I figure Slog readers tend to run their web browsers at high resolutions; not sure why this wasn't taken into account in the new design.

And if comment boxes popped up at a lower width, they'd probably look better--certainly would reduce the dead space, anyway. As it stands, the comment boxes do not auto-center if I manually adjust the width in Firefox.

Out of curiosity's sake, I popped over to the Mercury and saw the original search box still there. Man, that thing is useful. Why the heck did you guys dump it?!

>>Just to keep things on-topic around here, please enjoy this late-night We Hate It thread.

what thread? I don't see a link anywhere in this post. checked on IE on a work PC and safari for mac at home.

also, the comments look really crappy in IE. I'm not seeing the cutesy comic outlines, and there's no lines to break up the comments, just the numbers.

while we're talking general improvements, could you guys send some good writers/readers/commenters over to blogtown pdx? i really want to like that blog, but other than amy ruiz, it's a total wasteland over there.

Reload, Phred @84 -- the comments page stylesheet disappears periodically as they update it. That's what you're seeing -- raw comments with no CSS. It'll be back in two seconds.

Did the comment text get bigger or am I just psyching myself into thinking it's more readable?

If the former, YAY! The comments are still harder to read (and separate from each other) than before, but anything that makes it easier is awesome.

I generally like the new layout, but I'll add in my dislike of the "community" scroll. Further, if you're going to keep it animated, could you keep it moving? As it stands now (Firefox, latest build), it gets to the fourth selection and then stays there.

Lookout Landing also rolled out a new, more flashy but memory-gumming layout early this morning. What, do the web developers get paid this week?

"WHO STOLE MY CHEEEEEESE??!?!"

Bold the nav dropdowns, and it will be fine.

firefox 2.0.0.13 on os x 10.4.9

ugly.

layout appears to be fixed-width
new nav bar seems slow and the drop downs are -not pretty
-hard to use

Not sure I like the comments floating like that. A divider makes it faster and easier to read. Yes, I'm eighty years old.

I'm a progressive conservative. I favor change when it makes sense and serves a purpose, not just for change's sake.

The layout isn't bad, but it's causing more lag on Firefox than the old layout did.

@22: May I introduce you to my good friend Adblock?

Do I see a few new nice-clear fonts? great.
In general, the Slog page takes too long to load. I'd check in more often if it was quicker.

Also, please, more jumps, less of the blah-blah (and less damn scrolling). If I want to read a post, I'll jump.

I love the new look. Loads way faster, and I like the right-flush content. Screw the haters.

Wow, I really like it.

Okay, I'm probably just repeating a bunch of complaints other people have already noted, but what the hell, it wouldn't be SLOG if we didn't beat the dead horse into a bloody puddle:

1. The offset column is fucking annoying as hell - I feel like I'm going cross-eyed trying to keep focus on it.

2. Where the fuck are the subject tags? How will teh newbies know if something isn't SFW, if'n you don't tell them before-hand?

3. All the blank space is a freakin' waste. If the idea was that eyeballs would naturally gravitate to the text on a big ole' giant empty frame - wrong!

4. If you're going to use jump buttons, maybe you should let them "float" down one of the big ole blank columns (I vote left!), so that people don't have to scroll/jump all the way back up to the top of the page to use them.

5. Has the font size been reduced? Looks a little smaller than before - if you gotta change it, a larger size would have been better, especially if you're going to use a san-sefit font.

6. And maybe we could see some consistency with teh fonts? Like maybe using the same friggin' one in the comment entry/preview window as is used in the posted comments?

7. Speaking of which, the little comment cartoon bubbles are sort of cute - kill them immediately.

I miss the subject-specific roll of slog posts on each subjects page. For example, I'd go to the vis art page just to look at all the recent art-related posts. Now I can't do that! Unless I'm missing something, boo. I'm sad.

Just one thing:
Slog is too wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiide.

My eyes actually have to move back and forth across the page to read Slog! Now it's hard to scan through all the day's posts quickly. o_0

Anthony & Co.

LOVE the comments change.. the speech bubble is cute and functional.

ONLY SUGGESTION:
Change the Slog blockquotes back to a 10% grey shade. Keep the 1-pixel outline if you want, but the grey was useful, visually speaking.

If there were other changes, I haven't noticed them, which means they were good.

Cheers.

Ummm...it looks like the Seattle Weekly

my only complaint is the deletion of the "hide profanity" button at the bottom. just sayin.