I'm almost never one to complain about redesigns. In fact, I've done it twice or three times in my life up to this point. Here are my criticisms.
1: Two too many colors. A site that represents a distinct and specific aesthetic can work with more busy color pallets that fit that specific theme. Anime is a medium, however; which makes it a lot more broad than that. Furthermore, even though MAL is obviously an otaku-fueled website, the idea here is that the enthusiasm comes from the users themselves; not from the site. My point? MAL is a site where a very subdued, very non-confrontational color pallet is in order. Just blue worked fine for me. It looked a little early 2000's, but it looked just fine. Perhaps just make a few better font choices, and it'd be up to speed with Youtube and the like.
2: The profile bio is on the top. I feel a site *about* lists shouldn't make the lists a second priority. I feel that this change will subconsciously direct new users to treat the site a little more as a blog, and a little less as a personalized database. I do like blogs, but there are plenty already, whereas this is the only really great anime database.
I know there's Hummingbird. But see, I went back there again to remind myself what it looked like, and...
1 (again): I really need to emphasize this. I enjoy going to tumblr when I'm looking for an *audiovisual* experience. I want fan art; I want crazy expressiveness; ext. I go to Hummingbird, and immediately get confronted with a giant anime background, like I'd get when logging into tumblr. I don't personally want a database/list website to be like that, however. Youtube doesn't shove a bunch of stuff into your face to get you hype; they let the videos do that by themselves. Wikipedia is about *information*, so it's natural that almost every page is packed full of text. The images are mostly tucked away on the right.
Think about Bing. It's got giant, big-old images plastered everywhere; but it's still not as pleasurable as the plain-white-nothingness you get from searching with Google. Graphic design textbooks might possibly tell you that bigger and more complex is always better--and we've sort of been accustomed to assuming that such a thing MUST always be an improvement--but in many instances, I would disagree.
Obviously, MAL has never looked anything like Tumblr, or Hummingbird, but this update has made it looks just a little bit closer to that.
3: DROP = RED = STRESS
I like to try things out more than I like to finish them. It's alright that many (or most) others have the inverse philosophy, but as you can see, I have a somewhat high drop ratio. I don't have the longest attention span (or the highest quantity of free time), so I don't want to commit myself to finishing something if I'm not invested enough.
In other words, just because I dropped a show doesn't mean I HATE it and can't stand it; it could just mean that I lost interest for the time being.
What I'm getting at is, the RED makes it feel like DROP equals BAD. I know that's not the intention, but that's how it subconsciously comes out--just a little bit. It makes me feel like I'm flexing for the people viewing my page, like "AHA I'm so badddd look at all the shows I dropped! You caught me red handed!"
An anime Youtuber I know often gets asked why he drops so many shows as it is, and so now he's going to get that question even more because MAL is drawing attention to it.
4: "Mean score"
Who the heck cares about the mean score? Maybe for a fun little stat, sure, but why is it such a prominent number to put on there? Again, think about how this will ever-so-slightly condition peoples' mentality towards everything.
5: All the information on the side. This mostly ties into #2. All the stuff on the side is about how the person interacts with MyAnimeList.net, and *not* about how that person interacts with anime itself. Which again, there's plenty of great otaku bouncy-houses on the net to marinate yourself in and hang out with others; but there's only *one* anime database this complete, and this clean.
These problems will certainly not be things everyone--or most people--will care about. Though, I'd like to know: what are the GOOD things about this redesign? What are some positive elements to counteract the negative ones I perceive? That's really the reason this kind of bothers me; it just feels pointless and accomplishing of nothing. 0 steps forward, 2 steps back. |