New Hood

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So as you’ve probably noticed things look different. For this, we thank (and thank and thank) Derik Badman, who has not only worked his butt off to make this happen, but who has also had to deal with my incessant obsessive carping, a fate that no self-respecting web designer should be forced to endure. So thorough was said carping that Derik has in fact disavowed all design input, and insists he was only responsible for tech. I will abide by the letter of his wishes in this regard…but I still feel strongly that if anything looks good, you should give him credit, and if anything doesn’t, you should blame me.

Also, I want to extend groveling appreciation to the incomparable Edie Fake, who designed our new banner just as he designed our old one. If you pine for the old one, I thought I’d put it here, where the nostalgic can still visit it as they wish.

And since this is HU, we will now move to the cranky criticism portion of the post.

Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!!!!!

Or as my dear friend Bert Stabler put it:

Ugh. Crowded, confusing, clashing colors. Maybe I would like it if I liked reading magazines, which I distinctly do not. But on web pages, less is emphatically more. The TCJ design (which I think carried over from pre-TCJ) was perfect.

I’m sure Bert won’t be the only one displeased. I’m quite happy with our new format, but obviously some people are going to pine for the simpler, more streamlined days of yore.

So…why’d we do it?

Well, basically we were outgrowing our old digs. HU has been moving fitfully towards a magazine format with more contributors and more content. As a result, long ambitious articles get knocked off the top of the page by shorter (albeit still brilliant!) chatty, bloggy pieces. That doesn’t seem fair to either readers or writers. The new design will help us feature the bigger pieces for longer…and should give us room to grow and put out more content if it should come to that.

A ton of people were kind enough to look at the new design in various stages and offer advice and guidance. The site looks and works much better thanks to their input. Many, many thanks to Melinda Beasi, Ng Suat Tong, Kinukitty, Bert Stabler, Derik Badman, Sean Michael Robinson, Kate Dacey, Bill Randall, Robert Stanely Martin, Caroline Small, Craig Fischer, Erica Friedman, Jared Gardner, and Tucker Stone. (And if I’ve forgotten you, please email me to tell me I’m an ingrate/remind me to thank you publicly.)

Despite the help of so many folks, I’m sure there are bound to be bugs and bumps as we get used to the place. Let us know what they are and we’ll try to fix them and/or ignore them, as the case may be. In the meantime, I hope you get a chance to look around. We’ve got a bunch of exciting posts coming this week — and we’re also pleased to welcome a new temporary blogger, Anja Flower, who’ll be writing regularly with us for at least a couple months. Also, scroll down to the right and you’ll see we’re going to be featuring some posts from the archives. This week, we’ve got Caro’s post on Anke Feuchtenberger.

Also, we’re now enthusiastically social mediaing. You can follow us on twitter, or on facebook. Or you can get our RSS feed.

We haven’t managed to do quite everything I’d hoped. Enabling editing of comments turned out to be harder than I thought; I still need to put together a blog roll, damn it…and I really want, sometime, to move our old blogspot material over here….

But for now this is what we’ve got…and not so bad, I hope. Thanks again to Derik, to everyone who helped with the design, and of course to all of our regular writers, commenters, and readers. If you have a compliment or complaint you can email me at noahberlatsky at gmail. Or leave a comment!

28 thoughts on “New Hood”

  1. I was writing a comment while I guess you were hitting “Go” on the change machine. I hit post, and when the page reloaded I was staring at gray slate and a pile of slime. Very disconcerting. Love the slime, though.

  3. I much prefer the old banner, but it’s nothing I’ll get upset about.

    As I type this, my words are nearly invisible, grey on grey, one-fourth the type size of the comments. Impossible to monitor for typos. Is this some browser fuckery, or is it built into the new design?

    Personally I really dislike sans serif fonts for extended text, but it seems crisp and OK here.

    The big plus, so far as I’m concerned, is the much larger image size.Before, we were limited to 425 p of image width, now we get 660.

    I guess this first week will be a shakedown cruise, with tons of panicky and puzzled posts from contributors. maybe Derik can compile a FAQ email.

    Congrats, BTW,to derik, and thanks.

    Hey, Noah– where are the contributor bios? you nagged me enough about mine!

  4. hold the phone, I just got a look at my old posts. The graphics are MUCH crisper and clearer and superior in every way. So, huzzah!

  5. Contributor bios are up on the navbar, right under the new banner you don’t like sufficiently.

    The comments entry size…yes, I just noted that. I’ll talk to Derik….

  9. I personally think the new layout is an improvement, but I preferred the aesthetics of the previous design – especially the header graphic. Also, where’s the “the?” Seems to me “The Hooded Utilitarian” is best. “HU” is fine (as long as it has “The Hooded Utilitarian” as subtitle), but “Hooded Utilitarian” is an unhappy medium and quite clunky.

    Also, if the nearly impossible-to-read tiny text in the comment entry box is browser fuckery, it’s browser fuckery that I’m also experiencing.

  10. The drop-down menus – they look nice, but can be frustrating to operate (as drop-down menus generally are).

  11. Aha! I think Derik just fixed the comments; mine are now nice and visible.

    The contributor pull downs are a little tricky, but I think work okay ultimately….we’ll see if there’s huge unhappiness….

    And the the…yes I think you’re right. We’ll see what we can do….

  12. I honestly can’t think of a better image for HU than sentient slime.

    Everything’s working nicely as far as I can tell. Great job every one!

  13. Yeah…Edie said, do you want to be clouds or do you want to be slime, and I said — Slime!

    Also, my seven-year old really, really likes the new banner. Damn it.

  14. fwiw, in the cases where there are two levels of dropdowns, the options on the first level will take you to a page with the list that is the second level (if that makes sense… (ie “Bloggers” will take you to a page with the list of bloggers.)

  15. Noah,

    The new banner…. so gross. Gross. I suppose there’s more I could say, but as far as five letter reactions go, it’s probably fine…. Gross.

    Okay, it’s out of my system!

  17. Yep, the comment box looks nice ‘n’ fixed from my end!

    Sentient slime is a nice symbol indeed, but the rendering of the bones – and the color scheme – was so pretty!

    You could always turn the “THE” sideways and append it vertically to the left of the banner, snugged up against the “H” in “HOODED…”

    Also, I just checked out Edie Fake’s site and *dayum*! Patterny texturelicious radikewl without the snide Vice Magazine vibe. Or at least that’s how I’m reading it. :D

  19. Yeah, I wasn’t complaining about the functionality- it’s going to be a much better and more usable site! Kudos to everyone involved. It’s just the color of the banner…. !

  22. You all know I’m a huge horror film fan, right?

    I was talking to Edie about Cthulhu the evening I asked him to do this; maybe it was an inspiration!

    Also…there’s definitely something apropos about having the HU banner repulse people….

    And Anja, I talked to Edie, and I think he will give us back our “the”. It’ll just take a day or two, though.

  24. Hooded Utilitarian: The Return of “The!”

    There – it’s a horror movie now. :D

  26. searches no longer seem to return hits from comments threads, only from posts proper.

    also i checked a couple old comments threads that exceed 100 posts, and there doesn’t seem to be any way to look at the posts before the 100 mark. i’m thinking i must just be looking in the wrong places.

  28. Okay; I solved the problem with comment pages by just making all the comments show up in one long run; I was always a little unhappy with having them in multiple pages anyway.

    Still need to work out the search issue….

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