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Comment by marknutter | Hacker News Reader

There's a fine line you can cross with minimalist design where it suddenly feels cold, generic, and frail. And I believe Github has crossed this line with this new homepage. I also echo some other's lamentations that Octocat is gone. It's just not.. fun.

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I always found all of those 'fun' elements of GitHub to be sort of patronizing. It took extra effort for me to get past all of that 'fun' gloss to appreciate what a powerful tool it could be.

That's what makes design so challenging. Both you and I want to use the product and have legitimate but different tastes. New homepage looks like an improvement to me.

I don't know, I was a bit sad when "hardcore forking action" disappeared.

Holy cow, it's gone! I will miss this. Forking seems faster now, at least.

This is why I always stare down people who make jokes at work. I'm not getting paid to laugh, I'm here to slave my life away for someone else... brevity be damned!

The last version of our homepage never had an Octocat on it :).

I can't say I understand the octocat. It's a very strange character.. but very good. It makes no sense, but I love it.

I don't think cold and generic is necessarily a bad thing for github at the current stage of their evolution. They've already got about as good a reputation as they can possibly have among developers, and any logged in user never sees the homepage.

They don't need to market to developers anymore. Developers are going to be requesting approval from their bosses or purchasing managers to use github, and what the homepage needs to do is reassure the purchasers that github is a serious business.

generic = corporate/mainstream appeal. they're not marketing to hackers anymore. as a github user, how many times will you be looking at their homepage?

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