Not bad, but the left (article image) and right columns are quite wide, so that the middle (text) column is rather narrow. Of course if you run your browser at super-high-res you don't notice that, but many people don't.

I'm on #drupal, #drupal-support and #drupal-themes as "Trae" if you'd like to talk to me that way. :) I look forward to the feedback. I'm excited about it.

Usability:
It's really hard for the eye to follow what's going on.

Colors/graphic design:
That is the ugliest website I have seen since circa 1999.

Summary:
I love change; I always live on the bleeding edge when I can. But this theme is a major step backwards. Are you sure you want to do that?

The inter-letter spacing is too wide, my brain sees the text as:

t h i s i s s o m e t e x t

Which is pretty hard to read.

The line spacing is too sparse. It is actually unpleasant to read the text.

On a somewhat less important note the right sidebar is too wide, and leaves very little space for the main text if I try to browse from my Nokia 770 Internet Tablet (800x480 screen).

In addition to the comments above, I also found the text color of mailing list posts too bright on my (LCD) screen, and I would prefer a monospace font.

There are a couple of niggles with the new format.

The main problem is that when viewing an article the righthand navigation column obscures the last few characters from the end of every line in the lefthand column in the section that is in monospaced font (i.e. the extracts of e-mail exchanges on the kernel lists). This makes it exceeding difficult to read properly. The intro section of the article in proportional font is fine.

The layout of the main page gives too much space to the navigation column and not enough to the text column. It feels very squashed. I am using IE almost maximised on an LCD screen that is 1024x1280 (i.e rotated to portrait mode). Also - the subjects of the latest fourum posts only show the first three words before adding the ellipsis. This is not enough of a tease to get me to follow the links.

Additionally, on the main page when I run my mouse pointer over the "read more | nn comments" lines under each article precis I see that line jump to the right by one character. Once the line jumps it does not appear to jump back after the mouse pointer is moved away. Is this intentional? If so I find it mildly distracting.

- I also find that Inter-letter spacing is too wide.

- The grey color of comments on my LCD screen is too bright.

- Just a detail, but it takes about 0.5 to 1 second on my (old) computer to highlight any link I'm pointing on. So if I move my mouse quickly on a list of links, the highlight lags. It makes the navigation feel a bit "heavy", but I'm not sure what is causing this. (I'm using Epiphany).

Otherwise, I like the new theme. It looks less "cold" :-)
I also like the vertical separation in two parts instead of three (currently). Good job!

I'm throwing my votes in the letter-spacing-too-wide, font-contrast-too-low, and monospace-font-for-email-text camps.

More importantly, I think all of those are causing a larger general problem: the functional density of the new design is too low. On the current site, I get the 10 latest forum posts, 3 stories, 7 ads (counting the OSL sponsor), the forum-topics sidebar with 9 entries, and the who's-online sidebar with 4 entries. My desktop window is 1600x1200, and my browser is about 1200x1200 square. Navigation is tiny on the sidebar. The user/login is easy to find but not overwhelming.

On the new design, I get 9 of the latest forum posts on the side, one story (!!), and one ad. Navigation takes up a huge amount of space (both content and whitespace) on the sidebar for only two items. I don't see a user/pass box, but maybe that's not done yet. I have to scroll to see who's online.

While I would say the existing design is beautiful (it's a bit drab for my tastes), it is highly functional, and for the kernel development community, I think that should be the driving force behind any redesign. There's a new design aesthetic, sure, but it has ruined the functionality of the site. I'm not exaggerating when I say, "ruined." Getting only 1 story on a 1200x1200 browser window is horrible site layout unless someone is trying for an artistic effect where looks are more important than content. And I don't think that's the goal here.

Please take these comments as constructive criticism. I also don't like the aesthetics of the new site, but that's a whole other different-strokes-for-different-folks conversation. From a purely functional viewpoint, the new design is a step backward.

I find that the new look improve the contrast of the ads which become more snazzy. I barely notice them on the regular site. I guess this is the reward for this great quality content site... Keep up !

(ad-block is still my friend)

The top (horizontal) menu lags a lot when hovering over the links in Firefox 1.5.0.5 on Linux.

A couple of things about the new site look:

• The new logo is really nice!
  
• The grey text on white in the mailing-list postings of the articles is very difficult to read. I had to hi-lite the article to read it. Please consider making this text darker.
  
• The right edge of the mailing-list postings get cut off at some resolutions. This is particularily bad in IE where I can't read the full article text even at 1600x1200 with the browser maximized.
  
• The style and color of the line when hovering over links is barely visible against the white background.
  
• The logo appears inset from the rest of the banner bar in IE.
  
• In Firefox, when you hover over a menu item ("forums", "news"), the rest of the page is moved downwards.
  
• The navigation pane appears too large in relation to the article column.
  

I have problems with the links on the new site. Whenever I move the mouse over a link the entire paragraph is reformatted with just one or two words on each line. I use mozilla-1.7.13-1.1.fc5.

I like the overall appearance. But:
The font size used for articles is too small and the inter-character and inter-line spacing too large. As a result, I have trouble reading it and the word density is rather low. The old format has this better.

As many others commented out, I find the letterspacing of the choosen font very hard to read. Maybe an other font, like the one used in the old website version, would be a better option ?

The greyed color of text in comments is also harder to read (especially when combined with the fonts letterspacing problem).

But all in all, the new design is very beautiful, and more fresh.

I must say that I agree with the consensus critiques: font-contrast is poor, kerning is waaay off, story-width is much to narrow, monospace fonts for email much preferred, and the font choice up top is .. too irregular.

A big thing for me is the color of the top logo/bar -- while I admit to generally preferring a cold color-temperature (most seem to), that green is like trying to read all-caps text: it's garish and alarming.

I really prefer the current setup: it's clean, well-delineated, very functional. It delivers the content with a very high signal-to-noise ratio. In my perfect world I'd be able to continue seeing the content in the current format -- hey I'd register kerneltrap-old-and-sweet.org for you :) If the design does model-view-controller well, it'd be trivial. Heh.

Love the site's content, regardless.

I can't read the gray-on-black text in the quoted email in http://newkerneltrap.osuosl.org/node/6737

For those of us in the bifocal set, anything other than black text on a light background is problematic. Even white text on black makes my eyes water.

Sorry, Jeremy, you say you don't care whether we like it. So you won't care, but nevertheless the new design looks rather crappy to me, it's an rather badly-designed everyday blog design. It's neither easy to read nor good looking. PLEASE don't use it.

I'm curious -- along with many other folks, I posted awhile ago with succinct criticisms of the new design. I understand that a lot of things can be reduced to personal preference, but some things are more objectively assailable.

Mixing green and red text, e.g., is patently stupid and hard to read: they are at opposite ends of the spectrum. There's a reason nobody else does that. This is a ground-level basic UI thing.

Other things, like the absurd amount of whitespace... well, people have already enumerated a long list of 1) fairly well-thought-out critiques which are 2) suprisingly in agreement, to a large degree.

My question is simple: is it really going to stay like this? Really? It sounds petulant, but that's honestly not my intent: I just don't want to read things in this less-consistent, less-considered, more arbitrarily-formatted design and will probably ditch kerneltrap over this if this look is here to stay.

As I said before, I'd be happy to buy ogkerneltrap.org if I could see the same content without the schlock.