I am a proud reader of Slate. So what if Salon and Slate have had their spats through the years? Any publication that offers both David Edelstein’s movie reviews and Steven Johnson’s technology commentaries — along with lots of other fine reading — is going to be a permanent bookmark of mine.
But may I humbly suggest to the good people at Slate that they have taken a big step backward in their recent home page redesign? (And yes, I’m well aware that there are plenty of things about Salon’s own site organization that could be improved.)
For many years now Slate has had a highly sensible home page design, one that paralleled the essential good sense of blog organization: Newly posted articles appeared at the top of a long scrolling list, and older articles sank to the bottom. Subheaders divided this list by day. Like a blog, Slate’s design let you load up the page and scroll down steadily, picking what to read, until you started recognizing stuff that you’d already seen on your last visit. And a big “display block” at the top of the page allowed Slate’s editors to call out the articles they thought were hottest or best or most deserving of our attention.
For reasons that I cannot fathom, Slate has now changed over to a two-column format. The list is substantially similar (though harder to read thanks to some font tweaks), but it wraps down one column and then starts over at the top again. This is an incredible pain; you scroll down and scan headlines, then you have to scroll back up and then scroll back down… There’s no scarcity of vertical space in a browser, the way there is on a paper page. A two-column format only makes sense if you are making editorial choices about what to put at the top of each column, so that you crowd more of the stuff you think is important onto the “top screen.” What point is a two-column format when the list is still ordered chronologically?
In other changes, Slate now lets you click on linked days of the week to see what the previous days’ “display blocks” looked like. That’s a nice touch.
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