Aaron 31 Aug 05

Also read: http://www.subtraction.com/archives/2005/0830_making_new_f.php

Jeff Croft 31 Aug 05

As I said over at Subtraction:

“I’ll be curious to see what kind of response you get to the width of the layout. I thought ALA was able to pull off the 1024px-based layout because of it’s target audience, but The Onion presumably has a much more general group of readers. I wonder how many people will required to scroll horizontally and how they’ll react to that.”

All in all, this is a very nice redesign. Khoi did a great job.

Ross Belmont 31 Aug 05

I had to scroll horizontally, and I’m on 17” PowerBook. Not sure how I feel about that…

Alexandre Simard 31 Aug 05

12” iBook and no horizontal scrolling. That’s what you get for paying three times what I payed. Ha!

Carl 31 Aug 05

Ross: 17” laptop here and no scroll.. you obviously have your resolution setting far too low… especially for a 17” laptop.

On my screen there is a good 350pixels or so on both the left and right margins when I view the onion… no horizontal scroll in site.

Jamie 31 Aug 05

I like the redesign technically, but not quite conceptually. I’ve always thought what made The Onion perfect is that the design and layout reminded me of a small town or college newspaper where the news was just slightly off and not quite “right”. The design was amateurish and that’s what made it even more hilarious.

I like the design. But it seems a little too polished for me. Doesn’t quite fit that brand personality that I’ve come to enjoy. But that’s just me.

till 31 Aug 05

The website is down for me. What a great redesign. Obviously it couldn’t handle the expectations.

Craig 31 Aug 05

From what I hear, Behaviour simply outsourced their end of the job….

TheMatt 31 Aug 05

I am glad I can block the sifr.js. When I loaded The Onion this morning on my rather ancient LInux box, all those Flash mastheads made the page load time around 20 seconds. Eeeep.

That said, the addition of RSS and better navigation (and archives) is nice.

Adam Michela 31 Aug 05

Jeff: Yeah, some complaints have come in on the 1024-optimized width in regards to AV Club, which Behavior designed also.

We had to do some hacking to make the width work for Netscape 7 users though.

Ross: Should be no scrolling for you. Was designed on a 15” Powerbook… so wouldn’t make much sense for that to happen on a 17” heh. You running at native res?

Craig: Not so, Behavior had some outside help but the whole team… most especially Khoi… who worked harder than anyone on the project. Many sleepless nights.

kelake 31 Aug 05

What’s with sifr.js? This is the first time I have knowingly seen this in a such a high profile site. Any comments on that feature? Does it increase page load times dramatically?

Craig 31 Aug 05

Adam: I type corrected.

Chris 01 Sep 05

Oh great. A website with a zillion things on its front page. No thanks.

Dan Wolfgang 01 Sep 05

I have to agree with Chris. With so much on the front page, I’m lost. Not good.

TheMatt 01 Sep 05

@kelake: Actually, this isn’t the first major use of sifr. A year or two back, ESPN.com went absolutely nuts with sifr (it was created there), to the point that I couldn’t load the page on my Linux box. All the Flash just shut it down.

Unfortunately, corporate suits want a site to have a font consistent with the network, blah blah blah. The fact that it hoses older machines, especially on Linux is a never-you-mind.

Darrel 09 Sep 05

Sifr seems nice until you have to deal with a site consistently with it. One of those ‘great for the designer, kind of annoying after awhile for the user’ things.

Like flash itself, in moderation it’s OK. I’m still not convinced the benefit outweighs the drawbacks though.

And that page width on the AV club site is just asinine.

I consider designers making 1000 pixel wide sites akin to Humvee drivers…they’re obviously compensating for something…