Yes, we’ve had one. Will be tweaked in the next week or so, so don’t start screaming. Lots of new cleverness. Please keep comments in this thread and don’t get too angry. We wouldn’t like you when you’re angry.
Rock, Paper, Shotgun
A Redesign For Life (Well, for a bit anyway)
Posted by RPS on April 29th, 2008 at 12:50 pm.
Share:« Eurogamer: Pete Hines on Fallout 3 | RPS Verdict: Trackmania United Forever »
Read our finest words
Respond to our gibber
- Funky Badger : “Tank needs a shield, dude. Blood Dragon armour does seem very powerful, mind.” on DragonLC: Return To Ostagar
- Buckermann : “Well honestly, in my opinion it's not always a bad thing when a online game has only a small player base. Less trash-talking, more "serious" ...” on The RPS Bargain Bucket: Bundles Of Fun
- Heliocentric : “What happened to capture the flag little girl? A flag which runs away and has its own body guard.” on Tommy Guns And Respawn Fictions
- KindredPhantom : “I like the running commentary from the character as he frags the opposition. This looks to be fun death match in rapture.” on Tommy Guns And Respawn Fictions
- Vinraith : “Heh, true, but if someone doesn't buy them new the poor bastards will go out of business and not be able to support things like ...” on The RPS Bargain Bucket: Bundles Of Fun
Play indie, mods, demos
Browse the archive
The “free” tag link in the “Play: indie, mods and webgames” box is now AWOL. I’m lazy & prefer to be able to click that when I want to skive here at work instead of copy & pasting another tag off the site & typing “free” in where needed.
Also the comments shift themselves to the right so they are centred on the page in IE7 once the side bar ends. Can screenshot if needed.
Working fine here. IE7 on XP64 (both fully up to date) with no extraneous toolbars etc.
I think my only problem with the new design is the lack of ability to right click on a title and open in new tab (or straight middle-click). This wouldn’t be so much of a problem if they opened as a new window (as firefox would catch it and make it a new tab instead), but it opens in the same tab.
In fact I’m not entirely sure I see the point of making the titles flashy, considering they’re all just text anyway…
Let me retract that statement about it working fine for me. I’ve never clicked on the article title before, I always use the “read the rest of this article” link. The article titles fire up a tiny menu & if I select “open in new window” it still opens in the same tab.
I like the colour scheme. Very State-y.
People have already brought up the horrible comment speech bubble and the wonky Flash title thingies. But I’ll mention them anyway to make myself feel useful.
Opinion away!
It’s good. Good redesign is good.
Horses away!
I just tried the Middle-mouse article heading click… the finger is there just TEASING me with it’s Middle Button Un-Clickabilty…
“OPINION AWAY!” – The catchcry of the new Superhero, ‘Mr Opinionated’ (close relative to Captain Obvious).
Well, it is unquestionably a standards-based, accessible and ergonomic experience.
And the comment bubble is probably the most ergonomic of all.
Nothing much to point at beyond everyone else’s posts, generally nice redesign, ‘Opinion away!’ is just genius, comment balloons not so.
Apart from the flashified fonts disabling middle click, I like it.
Bugger, your lovely site no longer works in my Opera (9.5 beta though.) Enabling cookies (but why?!) got the text to show but the images are gone. Image properties show “UNKNOWN_STRING_16060″. wtf?
Whose ‘bizarro’ version is known as The Bleeding Obvious!
All in all a good redesign, good job James. I hope they pay you well. :P
For the people having trouble with the Flash titles: running Firefox with Flashblock, I got regular HTML post title links (presumably the fallback), so if you’ve a way of disabling Flash client-side, try that.
I get paid in people complaining about my work over the Internet (no, this is part of my degree, and is done gratis.)
I’m sure based on the four or more comments about the Flash headings that they’ll get killed (it only takes three negative comments to get things irreversibly changed guys!).
Speech bubble will be replaced with Janek’s head on a pike.
I have re-added this.
Also, editor comments are now more visible.
Headlines randomly appear (or do not!) in Opera when scrolling quickly. Headlines previously present vanish and vice-versa.
We would *love* to be able to pay James. Despite the adverts, we really don’t make enough to pay anyone anything. RPS is done for free by all concerned. More on this soon.
James, your discovery of sexy fonts continues to astound me.
I like it.
…that is, I would, if website content didn’t get pushed all the way to the bottom below the lower end of the sidebar. It still doesn’t look bad, just highly irritating.
Do you pay him by “other” means. Including John’s mum?
I like the highlighting the RPS overlords and important people get, it makes it easier to skip to the important comments.
Also a suggestion, how about links on the articles to the previous article posted before the current and the article posted after the current one, it would make it easier to navigate.
The new fonts are nice, once I finally figured out that there were any (flashblock was doing its job and blocking them mercilessly).
If you can, you might want to decrease font size on the non-flashified headline text (the stuff sIFR covers up nicely). It’s much larger than the sIRFed text.
>I’m sure based on the four or more comments about the Flash headings that they’ll get killed (it only takes three negative comments to get things irreversibly changed guys!).
That’s great, thanks! (I don’t like them either, so I’ll add 1 positive comment in the other direction)
Only 3 comments huh, how about this:
RPS sucks with no free chocolate coming out of the screen
RPS sucks with no free chocolate coming out of the screen
RPS sucks with no free chocolate coming out of the screen
you know there’s a new sIFR version out? sIFR3? It doesn’t fix the middle click problem (it can’t be fixed anyway :( ) But it does fix a boatload of other bugs and issues.
Oh and the google tracking script goes at the very end of the page source, right above the [/body]-tag ;)
(Sorry, I just had to peak at the sourcecode.)
Hate to say it but I’m not exactly a fan of the speech bubble either :/ It sticks out too much and doesn’t really fit in the rest of the site design. Maybe if it was a bit smaller?
Don’t think this is part of the redesign, and I hope this isn’t considered nitpicking, but up at the top it says “Dinner with Ron Humble” when I think it should say “Rod Humble,” shouldn’t it?
Hey, I like the new special highlighting of the editors comments. A good idea indeed, and long overdue.
…They were always outlined, Ben.
I reckon the new look is good, but PLEASE bring back middle mouse button clickable news headers. I like to load multiple tabs of RPS goodness before I begin reading.
Pretty please.
PLEASE.
WITH SUGAR ON TOP.
Hey guys, did there used to be a ‘preview post’ feature? I don’t recall (how quickly we forget!) but now would be a good time to include one. Hacking away at one’s post after the fact to iron out any typos/HTML errors is a bit crude.
edit: Oh, and I just got a ‘You are posting comments too quickly’ error on the Crysis thread. Actually saying what constitutes ‘too quickly’ would be nice. 10 seconds, 30, a minute, five?…
Another vote for killing the comments bubble, here. I think what’s throwing me off is that it’s oval. Every other design-element on the site is squared/rectangular. Sure, the rounded corners are rounded, but they’re rounded corners on big rectangles. There’s nothing sphere-like at all on the entire site except for those comment bubbles. Make them smaller and squared and it might look better.
Other than that, it looks fine, though the rounded corners seem to add nothing but a bit of delay in how long it takes to load. And the front page seems to take a second or two to load now, when it didn’t before.
I’m not actually complaining in any real sense because you you could go with a feces-and-semen theme that was filled with brokenness, and I’d just learn to block out the visuals for the good readin’. It’s your site, do what you want with it, as long as you keep posting fun text. :)
A couple of technical quibbles.
1) The new site layout does not work very well with Microsoft Internet Explorer version 6.0 (in widespread corporate use). The actual posts are shown below everything else on the page. I have to scroll down three screenfuls before getting to the first post. There’s just a large, empty, dark grey space under the three picture linked posts at the top of the page.
Also, there’s a narrow, vertical, text-background-coloured sharp-cornered bar on the right side of the round-cornered post blocks.
2) The contrast between the dark site background and the light post text blocks is too great. It makes the site hard to look at, as if a flashlight was shining into my eyes while trying to read. I feel like squinting all the time. I don’t mean this as an aesthetic critisism, but purely an ergonomic one. The previous background colour did not have an effect like this.
The effect is not so bad in the beginning of the page, when there is stuff on the right, but delving further into the comments leaves one with wide dark margins on both sides of the text. I don’t even have the browser window maximised. My screen resolution is 1600×1200.
Thanks for actively improving the site! It’s always a good sign, although it’s content over form for me every time so I don’t care so much about how the site look like as long as it’s reasonably usable. How’s that for a run-on sentence?
About the speech bubble graphic: Kieron is a comic book writer. Surely this alone is reason enough to keep it? Let there be a small pictorial connection between the two entertainment media on this site. Very many gamers also read comics. Also, it’s a very clear symbol for the functionality.
Most of the things I have to say have already been reported repeatedly, so I’ll stick to the (slightly) more unique stuff.
A rounded-corner rectangle speech bubble would be ace, as devlocke may or may not be getting at. I’m pro-bubble myself, but I love improvements that unify the design of things.
In terms of functionality, are you taking requests? I’d really love some sort of mechanism for direct replies between individual comments to be easier to track. Nesting replies with an indent might do it, or perhaps something like that crazy auto-linking thing that the Gawker sites use. This may be blasphemy, but I hate trying to follow the lines of conversation up & down the entire comments thread.
The speech bubble is now rectangular and will probably be changed again and again and again.
Numerous other small fixes have been made.
The Flash headings are dead. Resume your middle-clicking, peons.
Adjust your monitor. It shouldn’t matter if I draw insulting pictures of your mother on the screen, it shouldn’t be able to hurt your eyes.
Also keep in mind that I am a lowly serf and must obey the wishes of the hivemind. As such, the site is made to their specification, and some things are x peggles in size, others are colored y and that’s not my fault.
Continue to report bugs.
Yay! I’m in middle-click heaven again. Thankyouverymuch.
I love the epic new font on the sidebar.
I like the change, it looks vereh nice!
The link has returned but it doesn’t do exactly what it says on the tin. It links to http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/?page_id=1509 which loads a page giving me a right royal rollicking about RSS feeds (even though I’m not using a feed reader just plain old IE7).
The comments have now resumed their linear off centre march down the page however. Many thanks =)
I don’t like to complain but the site is too slow (and locks up my Firefox) when loading pages. It’s as if it’s stuck in some kind of limbo that only ends just as it’s starting to roundify the ‘tables’ on the page. It’s very annoying pwease fix it!
Thank you for the hard work, James. And the results have come oh-so-very quickly. The new bubble is awesome (IMO), and middle-clickery has been restored to the masses.
James = Hero
Opera appears re-fixed, many thanks.
Frankly I couldn’t give a toss how it looks as long as the wordage is of the usual high calibre. I started following you lot a good ten years ago in PCG and I just hope you maintain similar high standards here.
YAY MIDDLE CLICK!!!
And @ ‘James T’ your Avatar is SEAN MICALEF? Um.. excuse me sir, but did you know you’ve got a Beret on your head?