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Welcome to the New Verge

theverge.com

22 pointsmaxbaines16 comments

I'm a designer, I'm all for new and crazy designs and all, but I usually go to the Verge at least once a day to check out "new tech / gadgets / sound bites" in the tech world, and this new design makes it incredibly difficult to do.

The headline font is so hard to scan, and they really lost density on the main page.

I think this goes beyond the "everyone hates change" category

I mean the type is great even if your eyes will bleed out while you get used to it. Individual post design is ok, homepage design feels claustrophobic.

Comments? Not a fan. Way too aggressive with the type and futuristic approach. If comments are so important, make them feel and look natural.

I am fully expecting for The Verge to make changes to their choices based on community feedback alone.

I am not hating on it, but I feel they went a bit overboard with it. There are more of these ultra-modern looking news outlets like inverse.com for example, but I feel there's a lot more coherence in inverse's website than in this redesign.

And then the colour scheme of the comment section. NO. Just no.

Usually new designs start out bold (and terrible) and are dialed back over time (to something sensible). Bloomberg springs to mind.

Coincidentally Bloomberg's bold design was ushered under Joshua Topolsky, one of The Verge's founders. He then went on to found The Outline, which arguably had an even bolder design. In many ways, The Outline's premise was the same as the new The Verge. I'm curious to see if The Outline was just to early, or whether the premise is just flawed.

Now he runs Input Magazine[1], which also has a lysergic aesthetics.

[1] https://www.inputmag.com

I'm glad there's a dark theme, but it's all a bit overwhelming. Once I browsed away from the site I kind of sighed with relief. It's all so shouty and eye catching. Just want them to dial it all down about 20%.

I really like the comment drawer, just wish it were easier to find the icon to make it appear.

The fonts, particularly on the headlines, require waaay tooo much effort to read.

Lastly, the magazine formatting is… distracting. It makes me less likely to want to leisurely browse the site.

Maybe I need to get back into RSS.

When I posted this I viewed it on an iPad mini, it renders I imagine similar to when viewing on mobile, really was not impressed and in my mind a regression. When viewing today on my desktop machine, I actually quite like the change.

Reminds me of early wired magazine

Nah chief. This ain’t it.

This is a worse mess than what preceded it.

I actually like it. Apparently I'm in the minority

This post crashes my HN iOS app.

This guy also built their new site: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lmfF0k2UcU&ab_channel=calle...

From the HN guidelines: “Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work.”

First, there’s some backstory behind that infamous Verge PC guide video- it’s not really Stefan Etienne (the guy in the video)’s fault, and The Verge eventually also acknowledged that it wasn’t a great video. Stefan is a great sport and wound up doing a followup with Linus Tech Tips [1]. At this point dragging up the PC build video is a tired meme and isn’t really useful commentary anywhere; it feels like a bit of a low blow.

Second, “this guy also built their new site” is categorically untrue; Stefan hasn’t worked for The Verge for some time, and I’m fairly certain that in actuality it was some larger team that built the new site and worked hard to do so.

Third, critiques on HN should be constructive instead of dismissive. I for one miss the information density that the old site provided, but there are elements of the new site that I think are great. I love the idea behind their “story stream” feed; I think having a specifically curated, opinionated topical news feed with an actual editorial voice is a huge breath of fresh air compared with having algorithmically generated news feeds shoved in front of my eyes on Twitter or Facebook or wherever. The cleaner design of article pages and overall fast load time are nice improvements too; the previous version of The Verge was notoriously slow to load. On a whole I think there’s more to like than dislike, and I’m sure they’ll keep iterating and tweaking the site over time. Broadly I’m willing to give the new design a chance and see where it goes (as opposed to just posting a cheap dismissal on HN for the sake of getting a zinger in).

[1] https://youtu.be/QKzmYsySGFQ

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