Post-Redesign Development & Design Priorities

Not sure if this falls under "drawer animations", but I didn't see this issue mentioned in a quick glance over this thread.

In the mobile version of the site, bringing out the navigation menu (top-right icon) takes a number of seconds to fully draw as it has this slow slide-down animation that displays all the menu options. This seems to only happen on Firefox (both Android and Win10)

@liquidsaiyan3: I see it. Will get a ticket filed. Thanks!

@liquidsaiyan3: This should now be fixed. Thanks for the heads-up!

I just really want to say that I love this design so much. Keep up the amazing work, team :D

Integrated decks! Looks great. Are there any plans to make note of who posted it, as well?

Also, I noticed that one of the panels for Murder Island expands much more than any others when hovered over. Checked all of the others in the On This Day carousel.

Well done guys, appreciate all the hard work done so far!

For the sake of my eyes, please revert the . . . fuschia? . . . color on the text. It's really bad. It is extremely difficult to read, particularly on small type. It's particularly jarring on the front page, since some links remain white until you hover over them and others are just colored all the time. Looks messy.

Yeah. The new color is giving me eye pain.

EDIT: For whatever reason, I'm finding the new color to be less bothersome without my glasses on. Still bothersome. Just less immediate.

I appreciate the return of more color to the site and finally being able to know what's linked text and what's underlined text, but I feel like a softer red would fit Giant Bomb better and would hurt our eyes way less than this weird neon magenta.

I also think part of the reason of why this is hurting our eyes isn't just about the color but also about the font.

edit: also, why is the Twitter box on the homepage bigger? It looks really ugly to have a long vertical box that goes way further down than the horizontal box right next to it, not to mention how it makes scrolling longer.

I also am having some real issues with this red text. It's not very pleasant on the eyes.

I hate to be that guy, since I was asking for more red, but this doesn't look great. I would have been happy with red underlines and a little more pizazz on the "Show More" areas of the carousels. The small forum and comment text in red is super hard on the eyes.

Edit: Sorry I double-hate to be that guy, but the new colour just seems dropped into place with no regard to the design around it. With names on forums and comments, the font seems to be a different size, too, unless that's just a weird effect of the text being more difficult to read now. But I pulled some screenshots from a few places on the site, and in all cases, the rest text looks bizzarely out-of-place. The original plan was just to use the BmB as an example but in uploading that, I found more places taht didn't look great. I appreciate that the request for more colour was heard, but it doesn't feel like it was implemented properly.

Yeah I'm having some issues with reading the new text colour. For accessibility reasons, it would be great to have something which has a greater contrast to the dark background.

Thank you so much for bringing the color back!!!

Personally I'm loving the red you used, but I wouldn't be against darkening it a bit, if it's really bothering a lot of users.

I also think the red could be improved. I really like that more color was added, but I think something more like this would be better:

I found #ff5254 to work well for the link color. All I did was eyedrop the giant bomb logo and make the red color a little lighter and desaturated. This helps improve the accessibilty score of the text contrast, and the less saturation makes it easier to read to me.

And then for the buttons, I used #ce2528 from eyedroping the giantbomb logo and making the red darker. The darker color here works nicely because there is white text on top of it.

Not only would these colors help with legibility, they also match the hue of the red from the Giant Bomb logo much better than the hot pink.

i am... hmmm.. I like that a reddish colour has returned but.. Isn't this worse than the original color you got rid of? Does this pass the accessibility tests that the original red didn't pass? I feel like an asshole because i do want red back, but i'm just surprised that this color apparently is better than the original one.

Edit: I do quite like the red on black. The red button with white text on it (Save modifications for example) is the one time that it hurts my eyes a bit.

I think...I like it? There’s some specific places where it flat out doesn’t work (see Nubster’s shots above) - but it looks hot in most places.

It looks especially good on a phone with a nice display. Furthering my theory that this entire redesign was done with a “mobile first” mentality.

Loving the pink

I'd like to add to the list of people finding the red/pink a bit difficult to read

@mostman said:

I really hope this isn't the case. I cannot imagine using this site on a mobile device. Of course, maybe I'm wrong and am just a dinosaur for preferring desktop. If there is some "mobile first" philosophy behind the redesign, I would hope it is based is actual usage data to back that up, as opposed to mobile design merely being the "hot" thing these days.

Design standards should yield to the users, not the other way around.

I dig the hitman2 red/pink, but it is a little bright on the two monitors I've tried it on with Dark Mode (I can't seem to find Light Mode anymore and I don't know if it's still available). Looks better on my phone, so that could just be my screens/bad eyesight being the issue.

While watching the Deadly Premonition ER, I had been tagging Jeff, Vinny, Ryan, and Brad into their appropriate videos. Once I see one video has had the tags approved, I go check the others to see if I missed anything.

I noticed that for BR-11 https://www.giantbomb.com/shows/endurance-run-deadly-premonition-part-br-11/2970-15221/free-video that Brad's tag is there, but Ryan's isn't. When I click "Add Tags" his name is there (for what I assume is a pending tag at the moment) along with Brad and the game's tag in the Existing Tags. I'm assuming it's still pending, but all the tags regardless of being approved or not are there aside from the poster, of course. (I'm also wondering if this was an oversight in terms of approval or if there is some bug, but like I said I believe it's former).

That said, instead of having the tags the user(s) have submitted in the Add Tags pop up with the already approved tags (the Existing Tags), I think having something like

Pending Tags: [USER SUBMITTED TAG], [USER SUBMITTED TAG]

in a greyed out font or some stylistic way to tell it hasn't been approved yet in a line below it. I believe this would be helpful for those users that want to help in categorizing the content, which overall helps the site. It's not a major deal, but it'd be a nice UI thing.

Keep up the good work!

Is the new embiggen fully implemented or still being tested? I'm super happy for the return of embiggen, but right now it's not working as the old embiggen used to work. The old embiggen made the video around the size of YouTube's large player, which was perfect, but this new embiggen is making videos bigger than the browser window which makes it pretty much unusable.

@johnymyko: Same thing here on my 1440p monitor.

Same for me now that I've tried it

yup, same issue for me. also it only seems to work with youtube vids but not with the GB player :(

I'm also seeing embiggen being too bigg. Win10, Chrome 77.0.3865.90, 1080p monitor. Here's a screenshot, you can see the video is cut off at the top by the site's menu bar and at the bottom by the Windows taskbar.

I was an avid Embiggen user and I am excited to see its return!

So is there any plans to fix the unreadable neon pink accents and the unusable embiggen video player or will it all just stay broken?

I'm noticing that forum posts and comments now don't say "posted by" anymore. The way the names are now just floating there without any design elements to separate them from the body of the post looks extremely weird.

Edit: and the timestamp is now down below, beside "Reply" and "Quote." What is the logic behind moving it down there and leaving the header so barren?

Also...sometimes the forum post timestamps don't show up anywhere at all, top or bottom. [on latest Firefox/Win10]

The previous logo for Quick Looks with the clock inside the bomb was perfect and fitted the overall redesign of the QL logo and website nicely in a coherent way. So why was it replaced with this super weird new logo with lines on places where clocks don't put lines, cropped on the sides, and just harder to read overall?

I know these logos for each show are almost more of passion projects than the actual focus on the site's development, but to me it just seems weird to spend time and effort getting rid of what was a perfect logo.

Welcome to this era of giant bomb development. Unnecessary logo changes? check! Make a consistent user experience? No thanks!

On a somewhat unrelated note, I notice that the Twitter feed now stretches about 12 lines further than it did, leading to a huge amount of dead grey space at the bottom of the main page since the "Latest from the Community" box isn't sized to keep pace. Because the thing everyone was clamoring for was more Twitter.

This is going to come across as aggressive, which it isn't intended to be*, but would it absolutely ruin their day to test some of this stuff before putting it out? It isn't like a lot of these things are particularly hard to nail down bugs or weird one offs - you can look at the page and immediately tell that it isn't right. That stuff slipping through makes things come off as extremely unprofessional. And not a good "It's Friday" kind of unprofessional. More like a "we just don't care at all" kind of unprofessional.

*(O.K., it's a little bit intentional)

@therealturk: This has been my issue with much of the site redesign-redesign. Every change that's implemented is almost immediately noticeable, and negatively so (save for the decks, those are great and I hope they're expanded upon). I know that they're working on this stuff for 8+ hours per day, but surely there is someone whose nose isn't always in this stuff who can look at it and give a thumbs up or thumb down. My worst-case scenario is that they're on some sort of "X changes/month" quota and are forced to push this stuff out, or that they're working in an environment where they can't properly test these changes without implementing them live.

I've been here since the first site design, and never before this one has it been so problematic and in such a long-running way. So much personality and flair was lost with this design and almost every new feature designed to bring it up to parity with the old ones come with its own whole host of problems, and then those attempted fixes always have problems associated as well. Like, just being real, it's a bummer. It's a legitimate bummer.

Digging the orange. I'd be happy for it to stay long-term. I mentioned in another thread that it looks like my foobar2000 setup, so I'm right at home.

Noticed last night that the video player sits nicely on a high-res monitor now. Looks good!

I think this was a thing before the new site but when I go to a comment section, sometimes the comment box is at the bottom of the page and sometimes it’s above the comments. Why does this happen? It’s annoying to have to go to all the way down the page to post, especially when a lot of ppl have already commented. Either way, it’d be cool if it was consistent.

@wemmick The new header is so much better and looks great!

Two things I'd love to see happen is to make the mouse area larger on the 3 profile buttons next to the search. They're very thin and it means the menu disappears a lot as I try to move to it. The other would be to move the search dropdown, when search is open, to the other side where my mouse is already - then I would have the X and the dropdown near each other.

Please could you put the "This day in Giant Bomb History" in chronological order?

Something I would love to see would be a change to the "in this episode" section of the video banner. Maybe make it a spoiler link or a "click to show more" link instead of just showing the whole list. Its nice to be surprised sometimes about whats in a video like UPF or other live stream, I can't be the only person who would enjoy this little change.

@schindigg: @sombre:

+1 to these ideas. Both features are great but with a tweak they could be absolutely perfect.

It has been a year since the redesign. One thing I still wish it had was the comment count # on the thumbnail. It really helps me out with limited time to watch GB these days to skim the videos and maybe watch something I may have missed.