Over the past couple of weeks, I've been busy with a couple of big projects, so I haven't had much time for online reading. As a result, I'm not sure about the exact date when they rolled it out, but -- in case you might have missed it -- Techcrunch has redesigned their site. As my old friends in the south might say, it's godawful.
There are so many aspects of this design that Fail. While I can appreciate the hipster sensibilities that bring us retro 8-bit icons and imagery, design is closely coupled with functionality. In this case, Techcrunch has gone from a site design that made news and content very accessible to one that has become virtually unreadable. If I didn't know better, I might suspect that the real driver behind the redesign was a desire to sabotage the property and the AOL portfolio. Unless, of course, the design originated from within the AOL group, which one also might suspect of being capable of something so bad.
Seriously though, when I first started reading it, I first thought that the site problems might be a result of using an old version of Firefox and html 5. Sadly, all of the modern-standard upgrades couldn't rescue it from the craptacularly awful. You really have to ask yourself, does this signal the death of tech blogs and online media as the go-to news source?
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