My name is Kurtis and I'm a product designer at Stack Exchange.
Recently, as we prepared to convert the Skeptics site to a new LESS framework, we conducted a design review based on all of your feedback and concluded that there are ways we can make the design better and more representative of the community. Plus, you asked for it!:
- Design: Contrast is not correct in the new design
- Can we redo the design?
- Is the new design a keeper?
- I don't see anything good in the new design?
We wanted to come up with an evolved look that better...
We began by removing a lot of the clutter and blockiness of the old design and were careful to consider contrast and function.
For the logo, yellow is a really difficult color on the web because it's often too bright with not enough contrast or becomes muddy very quickly when you try to darken it. We think that blue was is a much more positive color that represents clarity.
We didn't want the design to become too Spartan so we maintained a bit of the 'official documentation' concept from the current site design, but we've toned it back a ton.
For the meta version of the site, we would change the paper-colored background to white and convert all of the color to grayscale. This would make the meta site much brighter than the current meta design.
We'd love to hear your feedback on the new design, and should be able to launch a new design fairly quickly.
Thanks for being such a great community!