Post-Redesign Development & Design Priorities

I know you guys don't like hearing this, but the old design had so much more personality and polish than the current site. Obviously the latter comes with time, but how far down the roadmap (if it's on there at all) is the general look/design of the site? From the font treatments to the shadows, gradients, etc. the old site was 10000x better, to the point where right now it feels like we're navigating a template.

I didn't mind the fullscreen layout but this looks nice and clean ?.

Just wanted to say that the most recent change to the homepage is a definite improvement; looking forward to seeing the rest of those items in the OP get crossed off.

Huge thumbs up on the new homepage header.

@wemmick: While it does look somewhat better it doesn't really address the functionality issue. I still open the page and am presented with basically just a single video. Maybe it's just my setup, but if it was reduced to something like 85% size it would've made the initial page drastically more useful.

Edit: To illustrate, this is what the site looks like normally.

Now if I use the browser zoom function I can make it look like this, which is much more useful.

Sure, it doesn't look that good in this form, but if you float the main header left, stretched the carousel to fill the screen (showing more videos) and either put the upcoming section or maybe even forum feed on the right next to the header you'd have an actually good, informative and useful front page.

Edit 2: Apparently my windows was set to 125% magnification, leading to the bloated front page.

@ares42: generally I’m not sure why there is such an emphasis on horizontal carousels when the site is narrowly vertical. The look is cleaner but I agree that it doesn’t fix the overall issue of organization on the front page - both in terms of space and categories. I am consistently having to hunt around different hoppers for QL’s and shows that I KNOW have a new video up.

Last night's PokeMonday Night Combat is showing up for me under both the Live drop-down menu and on the front page Upcoming shows panel. The time of the show is listed as "TODAY 12:30AM". Note: this is UK time. Right now (in the UK) it is 12:15PM so the show was on nearly 12 hours ago and obviously shouldn't be showing up on the Upcoming lists any more.

New header design is awesome.

The header looks significantly better without the unnecessary added padding:

@humanity: Tbh, the more I think about it it just seems like the site was designed with mobile site design philosophy. Although checking it out on my pad it doesn't work any better there.

Just wanted to chime in and say the new header promo slot on the home page is a vast improvement.

This shot was in Chrome on a 1080p 16:9 montior, I think it works well and I'm much happier being able to see the latest bar in one page now. I like the padding, makes sense when you see the Watch Now and Watchlist buttons. I hope the rest of the site continues to see similar usability and layout improvements.

Home Page/splash screen looks way better now.

The new header image looks awesome on desktop and mobile! I love the show art inclusion. Great work!

@wemmick The new header promo looks nice. The gradient sidebar is a nice touch.

The new headers looks indeed super neat, hopefully they'll find the time and ideas to improve the plain looking carousels as well!

The new home page header is a massive step in this direction. I used to love how uniquely GB the site used to look, but this new redesign made it feel like a very by-the-numbers modern site, with all of those pitfalls.

The new header looks great and adds a lot to the "feel" of the site. I'm really looking forward to additional touches of personality in the future. Maybe some more red highlights?

I love how a 'tiny' change to the header is somehow a 'huge' improvement, and has 'only' taken months of negativity for the small revision to be made :/

@abnewton: Entitled much?

This change to the top slot is excellent.

The top slot looks GOOD AS HELL. Baby steps, devcast. Proud of y'all.

Nice going on the header. Looks a lot more clean now. Makes the front page vastly more inviting to me instead of overwhelming and bloated.

New topslot looks alot better than before , i still think it takes up way too much space size wise. ( i don't need 1 video to take up all that space on a 43" tv) but either way a nice improvement stylistically.

Really liking the change to the homepage.

100% This. More of this please @danauer !

That new topspot is waaaaay to big now. It looks cool, but I hope you'll resize it again, everything's pretty much too big already anyway.

New homepage is a huge improvement. I can actually see more than just the topslot now at 1440p. Though I think the blur on the right background of the topslot is over the top, something more subtle in the 0.10-0.20em range looks a lot nicer to me, but at that low I'm sure readability varies depending on the image used (it was GBE Playdate when I was looking at it).

I’m using Safari on an iPad Pro and all the fonts on the site are so tiny. I have to two-finger pinch to zoom in and then drag the page around. The comments section for videos is illegible normally.

@handlas said:

If he's a subscriber, there's a bit of entitlement. Yeah.

(On Chrome Win10 desktop) Not sure where to put this, but I kind of have an issue with a part of the new design. the Infinite/Upcoming part is super empty and takes up way too much space. If both of those would be accessible from page load instead of scrolling it would be a lot cleaner. Infinite between the GB logo an Live and upcoming as a right side pull out tab maybe? I know it's trying to use Metro styling, but that isn't really effective there. Love everything else about the design though. :)

I really like the new topslot. I would even prefer it to be 50%/50% instead of 75%/25%, but it's really good nonetheless.

@wemmick: I know comment counts are not top priority but it makes it so much easier for me finding what videos to watch and getting me to watch things I never would of thought to.

@bobby: I wish GB had a proper portrait mode like IGN or kotaku. But I suppose they use a vastly different css framework underneath.

Forums are broken. Again.

Column sizes changed on the main forum page and forum posts have the wrong sizes on the avatars and a larger space between comments.

Posting pictures is also broken. Selecting the option for the medium size will show them in the small size.

@johnymyko: Thanks for flagging - we'll take a look at those.

@borklund: The continue watching issue you posted should be resolved. Thanks for letting us know!

Ok duders I get it. Infinite! But three sections dedicated to it? An entire page on a large mobile phone.

@wemmick The quick looks show page is completely broken. When I click on the show page it takes me to a Trials quick look, which I don't understand why - its not the latest or the most recent quick look I watched. The most recent QL it shows in carrousel view is Dawn of Man from March 21. If I switch to grid view, the latest one it shows is Sunless skies.

Recently I've been encountering a problem where the audio is de-synched from the video. Clicking play on a page will start the audio, but not the video. Clicking play again gets the video to play, but also starts a second audio track. It's pretty hellish. You need to refresh the page to fix it.

This appears to happen most often when clicking into the Big Video from the front page.

I agree with this characterization.

To the designers, I think a big thing that people are reacting to is the font. Proxima Nova looks very clean and modern. I think the font that was used on the old site, Jubilat, represents the personality of Giant Bomb well. The irony is that fonts that look like Jubliat are more current than fonts that look like Proxima Nova, if you just take a look at sites like typewolf.com and awwwards.com. And what I'm also seeing in the web design community is a huge reaction against the tenents of flat design, to the point where words like "clean" and "minimal" are seen as memes. So I'd hope that the designers aren't worried about looking current, because it actually looks already dated.

Just noticed I lost all of my video progress bars.

@theadmin: I am seeing this issue in the carousel view, but when I switch to grid, I am able to use the pagination links at the bottom to get to the latest QL. Are you seeing the pagination tools? Or are they not working?

I've been watching these threads hoping for changes for a while but at this point it seems pretty obvious only minimal changes are in the pipeline for the near future.

I hope the site improves but I simply do not find it pleasant to use anymore and I have cancelled my premium membership.

• More episodes sorted latest first, added option to change sort order

This one isn't fixed. Changing order to oldest first also scrolls/changes to last page, so it seems like all it does is scrolling to oldest and not an actual sort. It should keep the same page. Or just default to page 1.

@wemmick Can we get an estimate of when the rest of the items on the fix list will be done? Are we looking in the next few weeks? months? Also, can you please allow us to set grid/carousel view as a toggle that stays? I like to use grid much more and that would be wonderful.

I just want to chime in to say that the player interface is awesome now! It's great to be able to know at a glance who uploaded/wrote the description, who appeared in the video, and what was played. The cast will be particularly helpful with guests! Being able to see a list of videos in which a given person is in would be really handy down the line, but the current design is sweet.