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by astral303 5171 days ago
Sorry, but I don't like it. I do like the top header and the color scheme in general. The texture in the header looks snazzy, in a good way.

The space wasted by the listing of stories is very excessive. That's the meat and potatoes of the site, yet I see 10 stories in the first screenfold vs 24 now. Why dedicate so much space to the wide "XX points" label? Is it even clickable (why would it be?) Arguably upvoting a story is more important and is actually actionable, yet the up vote "caret" looks way less clickable. The comment count balloons are jarring in their size and contrast and their random placement on the right side is distracting. When I glance at the page, I notice this jagged curve of gray dots, yet it delivers no useful information (other than how long the headline is, which is not useful).

So I think it's all about the spacing. When I look at that page, is the headline list easily perusable end parsable? I don't think it is. It is more spaced out than the current design, but it is surrounded and squeezed by these loud new elements. Think about the negative space created by the three new columns before the headline--I think clutters up the headline list.

Compared to the current design, this is a worse design. While the current HN design could use improvement (IMO text is too tiny), it does have a striking simplicity and focus on headlines that I love.

I apologize if I come off sounding harsh, and I certainly don't have design chops myself to pull off something like that (though I'd like to at some point in the future...)

2 comments

"(IMO text is too tiny)"

I run HN at 3 CTRL-+s. It solves the problem, permanently in most browsers.

This did inspire me to try a more aligned yet compact redesign:

http://news.ycombinator.com/newest (HN Aligned)

Instead of linking to the newest page on HN, how about linking directly to the content.

In this case: http://natewienert.com/hackernew

I understand you won't get nearly as much "karma" for linking to website in a comment as you would if you hit the frontpage, but now I had to go looking for your article in the long list of articles on the newest page with no real gain.