

Techmeme redesign - citadrianne
http://techmeme.com

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donohoe
It looks terrible - almost like something I'd come up with.

The main points for me are:

\- The fonts for starters just don't look good. I'd re-visit that.

\- The skinny horizontal menu

\- The "More" links below each article summary need work. Its a little
overwhelming and just runs on from the text.

I should note that I don't recall what it looked like pre-redesign.

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breckinloggins
Some ideas:

\- As others have said, the font.

\- I get the whole "look like the front page of a real newspaper" vibe, but I
think the contrast needs to be adjusted.

\- I feel like my eyes don't know where to look first. That's most likely
foremost a contrast problem, but there's probably some other tweaks that need
to be done.

\- The shape of your logo clashes with the implicit and explicit horizontal
lines on the site. I don't know how to fix this short of getting rid of the
jump in the logo.

\- The font on the nav bar is too thin for the very heavy background color.
The result is that every link on the nav bar looks blurry... as if the
background color is bleeding into the font glyphs.

\- The article meta-data takes up WAY too much vertical space. The chief
offender seems to be the tweets list. I'd change this to one line. You already
have an expander widget, so this wouldn't be too terrible on usability. To
emphasize how many tweets there are, why not do a sparkline or "...and 47
others" at the end of the tweet line?

\- Get rid of the "newest" column. Put it below the fold under "Who's hiring
in tech". You might also steal Reddit's idea of having a box up top where you
have the newest stories on rotation.

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radley
This is a huge opportunity for something else to replace them.

It's simply terrible. Really disappointed. I usually scan the site 3x5 times a
day.

\- functions more like a blog than an aggregate.

\- emphasizes sponsors and sharing over the actual headlines.

\- prominent sponsor section forces more headlines below the fold, only one or
two relevant articles are displayed as a result.

\- Newest headlines look like and are placed like Adwords.

\- Newest headlines are squeezed so narrow it takes 6 lines of text to say 2
lines worth of information.

\- barely any contrast between content and links so the content is now part of
the "clutter" they sought to avoid.

\- I just blocked(!) Sponsors and Hiring from the page, leaving a big white
hole between the content and Newest.

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rmassie
There is something wrong with it. I can't really describe what though. I think
the best designed news site out there right now is The Verge, but I'm sure
there are other examples of what is right.

~~~
username3
It's too white. It feels like it didn't load completely. Newest is narrow. 7
headlines take up 50 lines.

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adambard
If you don't have Optima (the font), it defaults to Trebuchet, which I find
very ugly. Could they not have used one of many available webfonts (from
Typekit/FontSquirrel/Google etc.)?

~~~
EthanEtienne
And seriously, why not a responsive design instead of having 3 different
versions of the same site (normal, mobile, mini)?

Checkout Twitter Bootstrap 2 (uut next week) or Foundation. It will make your
live so much easier, and the site will be a lot more readable.

[http://www.markdotto.com/2012/01/24/bootstrap-2-ready-for-
te...](http://www.markdotto.com/2012/01/24/bootstrap-2-ready-for-testing-and-
feedback/)

and

<http://foundation.zurb.com/>

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stevefarnworth
Being such an influential product for the "tech scene" (I've never really seen
its benefit over visiting only a couple of blogs, they all cross-link anyway,
but I digress), surely there'd be lines of highly talented young designers
queuing to get the opportunity to redesign Techmeme for free?

I know sites have to make money, but the sponsored area detracts massively
from the main stories and is the main area of focus, the page doesn't scale
well at all, the font's too small and the characters are too close together.

In a world where The Verge and TechCrunch will cover (I'm guessing) 80% of the
stories featured on there, there has to be something compelling to get people
scanning, and I don't think this redesign is it.

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sidcool
Why the hellish font?

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aeeeee
My first impression of this site is that the hyperlink to information ration
is way too high.

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mdoerneman
Articles has less screen real-estate (because of 3 columns) and it seems like
more work to just scroll through and read the headlines. I'm sure it will grow
on me but not a huge fan at the moment.

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SRSimko
I primarily use /river and I can say I definitely do not like it. It's not
easy to glance at and scan also the emphasis seems to be on the Journalist and
Media outlet not the story.

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cheald
It's...dense.

    
    
        body { line-height: 1.5; color: #333 }
    

Much better. Never underestimate the power of line-height.

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swombat
Does anyone still use TechMeme? I never actually used it, but I thought it had
mostly faded away by now?

~~~
sidcool
I still do, it's a very nifty site to get an objective feel of tech news. The
redesign however is not a very pleasant one, especially the font.

~~~
nextparadigms
I haven't found it objective in a while. It's mostly AppleMeme these days.

~~~
sidcool
That's probably because they have started featuring M G Seigler's articles a
lot. And as we know, he's an ardent Apple fan.

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nextparadigms
I don't think it uses the golden ratio, except for the 2nd column maybe. It
seems a little distracting.

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citadrianne
very prominent on the sponsored posts.

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fotoblur
3 column layouts never really work for me.

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shingen
Not an improvement. Whoever designed that needs help on the design side of
things.

The sponsored posts section disrupts the site and wastes massive space by
utilizing only the top fraction, but requiring about 1/3 the width.

The site should be doing a radically better job at sub sets of data by this
point. The tabs should be used for that. Instead there's a pointless "About"
tab up there - so if I visit Techmeme 100 times, how many times do I need that
tab?

