I don’t have especially strong feelings on the functional aspects of the new layout, but I do find the white-on-grey colour scheme quite dramatically more ugly than the old white-on-white scheme. I thought the old look was unusually elegant for a website and am sad that the site is now so much less pleasant to look at.
I also think it’s substantially lessened certain things that felt aesthetically pleasing. That said I had permanently changed my habits to instead use our staging server (lessestwrong.com) because for me the difference in eye-strain was so dramatic. I expect we’ll find ways to build a strong aesthetic with this theme, so I’m not too worried about the local change on that dimension being fairly negative.
Feedback appreciated. I share some of that (though I presumably have less of a strong reaction to this than you do, since otherwise I would have designed something else). I’ve been creating lots of drafts and gathering ideas to make things feel more aesthetically pleasing, so I hope I can address this over the coming months.
I don’t have especially strong feelings on the functional aspects of the new layout, but I do find the white-on-grey colour scheme quite dramatically more ugly than the old white-on-white scheme. I thought the old look was unusually elegant for a website and am sad that the site is now so much less pleasant to look at.
I also think it’s substantially lessened certain things that felt aesthetically pleasing. That said I had permanently changed my habits to instead use our staging server (lessestwrong.com) because for me the difference in eye-strain was so dramatic. I expect we’ll find ways to build a strong aesthetic with this theme, so I’m not too worried about the local change on that dimension being fairly negative.
Feedback appreciated. I share some of that (though I presumably have less of a strong reaction to this than you do, since otherwise I would have designed something else). I’ve been creating lots of drafts and gathering ideas to make things feel more aesthetically pleasing, so I hope I can address this over the coming months.