
Redesigning Techcrunch - charlieirish
http://bradfrostweb.com/blog/post/techcrunch/
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cliveowen
They overthought the whole thing. It's the usual design by committee mess you
get when you take something that is undeniably simple (like a blog) and you
elevate it to something that is not.

First of all, it looks like something straight out of the 90s that didn't age
well. Secondly the choice of a sans-serif font for a text is questionable and
the choice of Open Sans in particular is inexcusable.

The other day I was reading an article on my Nexus 5 and I couldn't help but
notice that the text is just too small/thin and the whole thing is just spaced
wrong.

If you ask me it' s a 4 out of 10 design wise.

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jxf
As a non-designer, can I ask what about Open Sans makes it "inexcusable" as a
type choice?

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cliveowen
It's just too thin. There's a reason thin fonts on mobile OSes are used only
for big text like date and time. Thin fonts are difficult to read, Open Sans
particularly so.

~~~
ryanSrich
Hmmm.. That's strange considering Steve Matteson (the type designer)[1]
optimized the typeface for both mobile and web use. Perhaps the mobile browser
you're using is rending it quite differently.

1:
[http://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Open+Sans](http://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Open+Sans)

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jws
Discussion is veering: This is neither a Techcrunch article nor a discussion
of this particular design which pleased the customer. It is an article about a
website design workflow from a _pattern lab_ † viewpoint.

 _pattern lab_ is collection of PHP tools for making web sites from organized,
abstracted components.

␄

† [http://pattern-lab.info/](http://pattern-lab.info/) (MIT license, lives on
github)

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iaskwhy
I dig the new design, it's better than the previous one and it seems much
faster too (not sure if this is because of the new design but that's how it
feels to me). Good work and a nice write-up.

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jaequery
good effort, but the new design does make my head spin and thus i rarely go to
TC anymore. it's just too much content in your face.

i find it interesting how they discuss and plan about fonts/colors down to the
wire for UI sake, and yet miss the "bigger" picture of readability.

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ryangripp
A lot of hard work by the team here, However, I agree with the comments---I
rarely go to tech crunch anymore since the new design. Too much going on.

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jimwalsh
Thanks for sharing. I always like Brad's posts, he does a good job explaining
his process. Some here may disagree with parts of it, but it's nice that he
takes time out to show us all of this. Thanks Brad!

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rpicard
Enjoyed the read! Pattern Lab looks pretty interesting too.

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lavametender
Still 75 share widgets and 6 analytic scripts per page and WordPress?

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lcnmrn
2010 called, it wants its article back.

[http://www.fastcodesign.com/1662630/is-undesigned-the-
next-g...](http://www.fastcodesign.com/1662630/is-undesigned-the-next-great-
web-trend-fat-chance)

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peto123
Doesn't matter. After Mike departure, TC became boring, and the number of
comments under articles dropped of significantly.

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junto
rm -rf /techcrunch

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dlsx
Good design, same shit writing.

