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.

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

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

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?

on toast.

This looks horrible.

Totally spooge-errific.

And the talk-bubble conceit is cloying.

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

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 much content "below the fold" as they say.

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

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

Hip-hop hooray.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Thanks!

Cute.

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

It looks fine, Geesh.

at least kill that damned drop shadow on 'SLOG'

it's definately better than the eiffel tower redo.

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.

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.)

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!

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.

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

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.

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

Blockquotes are ugly.

Couldn't we have been warned this was coming?

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.

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).

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

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?!

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.

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.

ugly.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.