
A List Apart 5.0 - pgmcgee
http://alistapart.com/article/a-list-apart-relaunches-new-features-new-design
======
mnicole
I'm kind of at a loss for words.

It used to be unique and friendly, and now it is just another Medium,
37signals, altered Bootstrap-looking thing with no personality. Not including
dates in the highlighted articles on the homepage (and only highlighting two
to begin with?), along with putting it at the bottom of the "More From" is a
huge miss (as the date of these types of articles is important to the context
and to give me an idea of how often they are written).

Having to click into, and then scroll, to see all of the topics instead of
having them in a sidebar adds more clicks for the user to navigate. The mix
between bolded blue links and thin black links.. the differences in formatting
between every single title, date and author depending on which part of the
site it is on.. The awkward "No" in "Issue No." and the misaligned/missing top
padding on the button-looking elements.. The terrible overall typography..
Just noticed that when you're in an article and hover over a subheader, it
shows a hidden element that pushes all of the content down.. The fact that the
"Share This" crap is on there at all (or that it isn't just one line of gray
icons) and that it is not spaced apart or visibly different from Kevin's
byline (which deserves more)..

.

~~~
larrydavid
Medium, 37 Signals and ALA look nothing like Bootstrap at all, so I'm not sure
why you made that comparison.

I am not a fan of this new redesign at all and feel like Medium and 37 signals
do the simple/clean layout approach much better than A List Apart. But as with
all three designs, the primary focus is on the content, which I guess is why
some people seem to think they lack 'personality'.

~~~
mnicole
Content = typography = the potential for a lot of personality if done
appropriately.

------
bbx
Oh, it's that _Grey Period_ [1] all over again...

I _loved_ the previous design [2]. It only used 2 fonts (and default ones, for
that matter): Georgia and Arial. But it didn't feel 'cheap'. The font-size,
letter-spacing, small-caps, weight and style variations provided a versatile
set of text layout.

The spacing and colors were perfect too, and yielded a well-thought and
pleasant visual hierarchy. It is one of the few websites I enjoyed reading
_directly_ from the website (instead of using Google Reader or Instapaper).

I'm sure many hours of work are behind that new design. And maybe it's the
same for any redesign: I'll get used to it. But I'm not thrilled. We'll see.

[1]: <http://jgthms.com/the-grey-period.html> [2]:
<http://alistapart.com/d//368/jsm.png>

~~~
arrrg
The font size used to be horrifically small. This is a big step up, for this
change alone.

~~~
stan_rogers
They fixed the too-small-font problem (finally!!) at the beginning of March
last year, making it a very reasonable read, and without changing the overall
design much.

------
pgrote
I am using Chrome on Windows 7. The menu bar on the top of the page cuts off
the title and the bottom of the page slightly cuts off the * FOR PEOPLE WHO
MAKE WEBSITES.

Is that the way it should look?

~~~
bullseye
<http://imageshack.us/a/img228/8256/alat.png>

I see the same thing. I have a hard time believing it is intentional, but even
so, I think it looks sloppy.

~~~
colmvp
I don't think it looks sloppy. It's intentionally styled like a magazine.
Magazines deliberately break typographic conventions.

~~~
frogpelt
I've never looked at a quality magazine cover and thought 'did they mean to
for it look like that?'

I thought that with this page.

So, that's one glaring difference.

~~~
cypher543
That's because a magazine is printed and its appearance doesn't vary between
people looking at it, so we automatically assume that it's supposed to look
the way it does. A website can look differently depending on which browser is
rendering it.

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pacomerh
It's actually funny how the communities of developers get divided into groups.
There's the know-everythings who are inclined to the technical side and have a
smart answer for anything and everything, all decisions are based on manuals
and numbers. Also, creative ones who have some sort of background in something
else other than development, like music or illustration, etc. They usually
make things touching a bit on the side of art, therefore experimenting a bit
more. In some cases these dudes will actually be very well versed on the
technical side, but not all of the time. So, the interesting thing here to see
how people appreciate websites in different forms. You see these guys from 'A
List Apart' sorta breaking schemes by doing a chopped title on the header, and
people here deciding it's a bug on their browser :) . I've seen designs on the
web that propose something different to the eye, where nerds will be ranting
that the rules say it's wrong because you're violating the rules of this or
that. Maybe I just wish I could experiment more, because I like looking at
developers and designers proposing new things.

~~~
camus
except these guys claim they have something to teach you, i'm sorry but based
on their sloppy design i conclude they do not.

~~~
pacomerh
Can you recommend a good person/group/source for great design?. I think these
guys Zeldman, Santamaria, etc, rather than innovators are good decision makers
in terms of where to place things on a page. Because it seems to be working
for everybody, and they proved it.

~~~
camus
dont care about these guys , they did not invent webdesign and i dont claim i
can teach people stuff while producing design that sucks.

~~~
pacomerh
That's just plain trolling

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saltcod
Wow. Despite the largely hideous comments here, it's beautiful. Great work.

~~~
orangethirty
Agreed. It is very readable, and eye pleasing.

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kmfrk
I don't think I've ever said this about a website, but the font size is way
too large. There is also too much text on each line.

I feel like this was approached from a layout perspective rather than a
typographic one.

For a site like ALA, I find the design to be really, really disappointing.

~~~
ahi
I wonder if the font size issue is because of display resolution. It looks
perfect on my screen, but I usually have to zoom into pages to make them
readable.

~~~
kmfrk
I imagine it'd look fine on a MacBook Air. It doesn't on a 23" monitor, that's
for sure.

I want to believe that the people behind it didn't bother to test it on
different viewports, but I have created websites that look fine on everything
from iPhones to large monitors without writing viewport-specific CSS.

It just seems incredibly sloppy, which is hard to believe for a company like
ALA.

~~~
DanBC
> _but I have created websites that look fine on everything_

Just checking, but really "look fine on everything", or "need to be zoomed in
by many people"?

~~~
kmfrk
Nah, it looks fine. You can zoom in, if you want, of course, but it's entirely
readable on a retina screen.

Of course, those have been very sparse in layout such as blogs, so it's not a
solution that fits all, but in a case like this, it would work just as well.

A site like Hacker News obviously needs optimization for different viewports.

~~~
DanBC
> You can zoom in, if you want, of course,

It's pleasing to be in a situation where I can say (about ALA5.0) "you can
zoom out, if you want, of course" :p

------
rodriguezcommaj
It may just need some getting used to, but at first glance - I am not digging
it all that much. I understand the thinking behind content first and thinking
outside of the "Desktop as "real design" mentality, but I feel like the
desktop (and even iPad landscape) version now suffers due to that mentality.
The shift of the menu and navigation to the bottom is also very annoying for
finding other pages quickly - and I know I am going to miss the quick glance
of multiple stories every other week on the home page. The old design was easy
to digest and get a summary of what was in that issue and whether or not I
wanted to read it. This version, not so much.

I like the idea of moving in the "boldy art-directed magazine" direction, so
maybe it will just take some time to get there and feel comfortable in that
role. But for now I feel like it is forcing a responsive, mobile design at
larger sizes and the layout suffering for it.

All that said, I adore the content (usually) and look forward to what they
have prepared for the future. Like any drastic change, I am sure I will grow
accustomed to it and will stop whining about it in a month or two.

~~~
rodriguezcommaj
I will add that I am loving seeing Kevin Cornell's illustrations at that size,
though.

------
tokenadult
The key paragraph in the article kindly submitted here appears to be below the
fold:

"Pirates ship

"To launch on time, we have knowingly held off on finessing certain details
and (like you do) decided to suppress a few niceties until after the relaunch.
If you spot a quirk in the UX logic, an inconsistency in the design hierarchy,
or a curious flaw in the CSS, we are probably working on it."

As announced on my HN user profile, I am updating my personal website (which
is seventeen years old, and which I last extensively updated in 1998). I'll
party like it's 1999 by reading the new-and-improved A List Apart both on my
desktop and with my Nexus 4 phone, and see what I think over a few weeks about
how well the new site design responds to the huge range of devices used to
acccess websites these days. This should be interesting food for thought.

------
charlieok
So they've got “articles”, “blog posts”, “link posts”, “columns” and a number
of “topics”. They're “publishing more frequently—a lot more frequently”.

Fantastic! So why do I just see one “RSS” link in the footer pointing to
<http://alistapart.com/site/rss> ?

Are they turning on the fire hose without giving users any way to control what
content/topic/author they subscribe to? And these guys are the shining
exemplars of site design and “content strategy”?

My feed reader just blew up with a slew of “new” entries from alistapart.com,
apparently a result of their new platform not properly handling the
identifiers from posts used on their previous platform.

I understand Zeldman & Co to be champions of web standards. RSS (and its
sibling rival, Atom) is still the best decentralized way to subscribe to
updates on the web that I know of. So why is their site apparently treating it
with such little regard?

Am I going to have to unsubscribe because they overwhelm me with stuff in
their feed with no good option for fine-tuning?

~~~
recuter
I've had that happen countless times with different feeds, it is very rarely
on purpose because as you say it leaves a bad taste.

For now, I'd chuck it up to a one-off snafu.

~~~
charlieok
Yeah, that's merely an annoying thing that seems to crop up occasionally with
RSS.

My main frustration here is not finding a menu of feed options; instead, I
just see one big site-wide feed.

I've had this frustration with many sites, and it's kept me from following
things I otherwise would have followed. I'm just much more mystified when the
entire aim of the site is “web design, by web designers, for web designers”.

------
waxjar
I was just thinking recently how amazingly not-outdated A List Apart's design
looked, despite it being really quite old.

~~~
bbx
Felt exactly the same. I visited the website yesterday and thought "This
design has been around for _years_ and it still feels fresh".

There was nothing to change about it, but I guess this redesign didn't happen
just for the sake of following the "grey" trend.

------
rwl4
Weird to see this in their HTML code:

    
    
      <!-- Prompt IE 6 users to install Chrome Frame. Remove this if you support IE 6.
    		 chromium.org/developers/how-tos/chrome-frame-getting-started -->
    

I'd probably remove that after I've made my decision about whether or not to
officially support IE 6.

------
run4yourlives
Sometimes, the biggest issue with designers is that they design. They're a lot
like programmers that way; further optimization is often only a step backward.

The old, JSM design was an absolutely stunning example of what web design can
be. It looked like a magazine. It read really well. Hell even the ads fit like
an accessory.

It's really hard to improve something so good. And this new design pretty much
proves that.

Unfortunately, their audience are people more concerned with trends and
'what's new' than those of us that prefer neat and predictable content
delivery. I'm sure in their echo chamber, they will overwhelmingly agree that
the design is "fresh" and "great".

Let that be a lesson to developers everywhere about spending too much time
with our own kind and not enough with the general population.

------
justjimmy
When I design website related work in Photoshop, I have a section of layers
that contains shapes with dimensions of the common resolutions ie: MBA 1366 x
768, 1024 x 768, etc.

I'm a bit surprised that the huge image isn't responsive so that it changes in
size - to always show or hint that there's something below the fold (ie:
<https://yourkarma.com/> )

This new design have nothing to indicate there are stuff below the fold when
viewed on a MBA 1366x768 or any with 768 height - it looks like a giant
magazine cover. Unless that was the intended effect.

(But then I'm using Chrome, so might look different in other browsers)

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dlf
Is the title hiding on purpose? Also, should the menu bar be fixed?

A List Apart is certainly ahead of me when it comes to what's up with web
design, so I'm honestly not sure if it's supposed to be like that or if
there's something amiss.

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rodriguezcommaj
I wish they would have styled actual text for the header and footer
logo/tagline. As it is, they are just huge images that do not scale AT ALL. I
guess you could call this art-directed, but it seems sloppy to me.

------
dreamdu5t
Looks like a wannabe version of the 37signals blog redesign. White background,
overly large text, no aside, author at the bottom, etc.

------
ahi
It has to be a little terrifying to redesign one of the most popular sites on
web design.

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DanBC
I like it. I dislike the weird stupid half cut header. (Because it looks like
there's a sticky header, but it's not a sticky header, and it feels like the
font is broken. That's a dissonance that I don't get from print-typography
experimentation.) But I like the "big" (readable) fonts. I'd probably make the
body font a tad bigger, but I guess that's just me. I wouldn't have a bright
white background either, but again that's mostly me. It's nice when a website
needs a minimum of tinkering to make it readable.

There are (as they say) a few oddities. The link on "Why are links blue" is
not blue, it's black.

------
hpaavola
And that's how you design blogs and similar sites. Put the content in the
spotlight and shove everything else away.

~~~
fhars
But they are not putting content in the spotlight, they are putting unreadable
letter bottoms and empty space in the spotlight, the content is shoved away to
somewhere far down. Maybe the design works on a tablet in portrait mode, but
not on a laptop screen. To see more the four lines of content there, you have
to scroll.

~~~
jammmuel
As has been mentioned, the main header is a typographic curiosity, not a bug.
Good design is often controversial. Programmer mentally is at odds with this
notion. I like what they've done. It has brought greater focus to the article
content. I'm all for bigger type, and the need to scroll is a non-issue in my
mind.

~~~
camus
good design serves a purpose , the half letters serves no purpose. If i did
this on my site everybody would say how stupid it is , but because it's from
"design rockstars" it is controvserial ? i call it bullshit .

~~~
_Simon
I call design is simply not as black and white as you'd like it to be and
cynicism is lazy. To deny that this aesthetic is controversial is to have not
read any of this thread. The very fact that you are suggesting a lack of
purpose in the design of the masthead and using a strawman to back it up
suggests a modicum of controversy.

~~~
camus
Whatever man , i call these so called "designers" bullshit, because they think
they can teach people anything about design when their own design makes no
sense at all, and frankly sucks. If i had a blog like this and if potential
clients would see that , they sure arent going to hire me, as all the blog
design feels ridicule and sloppy.

~~~
_Simon
Their solution is perfectly content, _you_ just don't like the aesthetic.
Nothing wrong with that at all and neither is expressing that opinion. Calling
the people behind the restyle of ALA 'so called "designers"' is disrespectful
though and no amount of fallacy is going to change that.

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aristus
Hmm. The article I wrote for them does not appear when searching for my name.
Finding it again through Google, it looks like they lost the images that went
with it. :(

[http://alistapart.com/article/accent-folding-for-auto-
comple...](http://alistapart.com/article/accent-folding-for-auto-complete)

------
verisimilitude
Let it be known that some have cut off the top of their text before ALA 5.0
(myself included: <http://tumbledry.org> ). I like this design because it's
opinionated, and I think we should wait to completely judge until they are
done and have polished it.

~~~
camus
Your title is still readable , theirs is not.

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apathetic
What's with the header[1] and the footer? It doesn't feel right.

1: <http://i.imgur.com/kTbkdXa.png>

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briancray
Looks like they need a better web server to go with that redesign

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night_fury
is it down for anyone else? connection keeps timing out =\

------
camus
welcome to the "appification" design era , where every web site is dull, flat
, look like each other and look like crap on laptops and desktops.

"Generic", 0 personality design may work on tablet but that's it. And what is
with these huge text fonts ? it's just not readable , reading is not about how
big letters are but how the eye is able to identify blocks of text. I just
cant read the text , it's just too difficult and exhausting.

------
nerdfiles
Ruined one of my favorite webzines.

