Slate's Gone Ugly

So Slate redesigned, and it's not pretty. The list of the day's stories are now two scrolls down the page. And after you scroll down past all the loud, garish junk up top, the lists of actual content swim around in white space way way down the page. Some pages scroll to the right in 1024. Plus the whole thing seems to be screaming at you - the new logo's so big that it pushes the content down the page and artificially inflates the red space up top. Mousing over the left hand side does things that just aren't natural.

In the article discussing the redesign, they say that the style's still in flux. Maybe it'll get better. Right now, the doodads are favored too greatly over the list of stories.

I've been browsing the Slate forums...it seems that nobody's really all that keen on the new design. Other complaints that I'd have to agree with: too many fonts, the boxes up top are disorganized. The opinion seems to be very negative on the redesign. Here's a Slate editor comment:

I'd be lying if I said we don't listen to what you all are saying. I've particularly enjoyed that people have used terms like "catastrophe", "atrocity", "unmitigated disaster" and "horror" to refer to a few font and color changes that they don't really like. I'm glad we can couch our dislike in realistic terms.

With that kind of defensiveness, it sounds like they're really getting hammered.