The Chicago Tribune's website has finally received a redesign. The old website, next to the New York Times, New Yorker, and CNN sites, was always the ugly cousin with a haircut from the early nineties. Building on the same design for years, it was expanded and altered bit by bit until it became a navy blue mud-pit of navigation and ads. As much as I want to have pride for the local paper here, nothing could convince me to attempt using that website.

I've been waiting for a redesign (even daydreaming about doing it myself) since I moved here, but the haircut I was hoping to see didn't happen. Just a lot of hair gel.

There are some improvements--wider page, centered, and css finally--but disappointingly, that's about where it ends. It's still nearly impossible to just scan the page. Once again they've traded the opportunity to trust a smart grid and white space to clearly organize the content, for a design that naively relies on rules, strokes, boxes, and background colors. Most of the time I spend on the site is used to decipher the layout and gain orientation, when it should be spent reading, no?

In the editor's notes of the site they opened comments, and the comments have flooded in. Must be embarrassing how unanimously negative they are (though I do find any "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" comment to be ridiculous... the site was terribly broken).