*Please* keep the images next to each story in the listing of recent articles. This has been the single best improvement in your layout relative to the old. It makes it very easy for me to quickly scan the listings for any articles I haven't read yet.

In terms of "breaking up the space" -- I notice that the entire section is indented. It would probably do the trick if you just un-indent the gray header lines for each day.

One small gripe I have with the new design (aside from the width issue with the cover box) is the excessive whitespace at the top of the page. It does give the site an odd feeling of greater permanence (if that makes sense), but I do feel like it's a bit much and that it drives more content below the fold.

Why not drop the "salon.com" text below the navigation bar and keep the logo as it is?

Hey Joan and everybody. The only thing that is hard to read for me is the wires treatment. When you switched to initial capping everything it started for me but then in its new treatment of all bold blue against a white background I find my eye wanders and can't fix anywhere. I miss the wires a lot. I'm slowly getting used to it but still feel there are readability problems. I don't have issues with white space at all and overall I love the new site and how quickly it loads. The top story treatment and additional story treatment area is very nicely done and gives you a lot more room for the top story graphic. Keep up the good work and give everyone in Prod a raise real soon. --ben

I read that you were rethinking the white space design of your current redesign. I just wanted to add my 2 cents on this. When the new site launched (and already before that in areas like War Room were the new design was already visible) I really liked that you made the pages less cluttered and used white space to make readers focus on the right things. So what I am saying is before you go back to the design table please make sure the end product of a re-redesign is not going to be a cluttered page.

Two areas which I think are a bit odd are the two boxes on the right hand side the service and the community boxes, they feel a bit out of place where they are right now.

overall though I think this is one of the best site redesigns I have seen in a long time.

carsten

One of the best features about the new design is the ability to change font sizes (the Font: S / S+ / S++ links). So why are letters, war room, and other sections written in a font size so small it looks like fine print, and without font-size links? I use S++ not because I'm blind but because it's a pleasure to read. So when I click on war room it's like scrolling through a software EULA. It also seems rather arbitary: users can adjust font size on articles, but not letters. Can you please add font-size links everywhere?

- adrian lafond

Enough already about the 'redesign". What about the content redesign. You now make the Equirer like they have gravitas. This publication is now just a sleazy gossip rag.

Overall, I really like the redesign. I love the letters option, and I can see that Salon has worked hard to come up with an attractive, easy-to-use design. I agree with other comments on the wire stories... since the redesign I keep missing them. They seem so separate from the rest of the page, maybe I'm subconsciously thinking of them as ads.

And I wish the new "Women's Blog" could have been accented with a color other than pink-- ANY other color! The chick-lit motif doesn't really do it for me.

"Our general template now looks like this: We have a column of AP wires running down the left side of the page in reverse chronological order, a cover box with the four to five biggest stories of the moment, a Blog Box area, descending below the cover box, where we can break out our burgeoning collection of editorial blogs, and below that a complete index of everything we've published recently in reverse chronological order.

"We arrived at this design because it allowed us to showcase more than one story at a time; in the old design, stories that weren't quite cover stories or were interesting for another reason couldn't be highlighted. Another problem we had in the old design was the lack of a more extensive index of our recent publishing history. The new design lays out everything we've published recently in reverse chronological order so that it's easy to find an article from a few days ago. "

To be blunt about it, this redesign is the ugliest thing I've seen since New Coke.

You focus on one article highlighted with a huge headline. Frequently this article could be the cover of Cosmo or People or Oprah. Then you have a box with not the "four or five biggest stories of the moment," but the latest installments of King Kaufman and The Fix, possibly a repeat of a War Room story, and yet another atempted justification of this redesign. Following that is what you're calling "The Blog Box", which repeats at least one of the "stories" you've already highlighted. Then comes the listing of stories, which repeats yet again the stuff you've highlighted just above it.

What's wrong with the white space is not the amount of it but the way it's used. It violates every rule of design I learned in J-School and on the job.

The net effect of the redesign is to push one story in everyone's face and obscure everything else with small type.

Finally, the process of writing a letter is needlessly confusing and frustrating. The procedure of entering a URL is so similar to the password that I discovered--AFTER I wrote the first letter--that my password was showing as my URL. Don't you think it would help to have that warning BEFORE the box for a letter, since it is off screen when one begins to type the letter?

I hope you are planning major changes because I really find the current state of the design not very usable.