Gawker has had all kinds of flaming attention for their network redesign, but this is not another post about their broken URLs. I’m not a regular reader of any of their sites, so it’s been interesting to check in and out periodically to take in a first judgements, with what I hope is less prejudice and expectation. I do this because these are interesting redesigns: Lots of fixed positioning; lots of big, dominant imagery; pleasant serifs throughout; and good detail on the UI widgets. It’s not been cheap, and away from the web architecture, it’s not a shoddy realisation of a design.

There are two major flaws that I identify. One is bugs in the right hand navigation, which lists recent headlines. There’s no scrollbar, and it responds very badly to scrolling with a mouse (moving too far too quickly, with an Apple Magic Mouse.) There’s a button at the base of the column for ‘More Headlines’, which scrolls the list by a page, but this is a misguided idea: Nobody thinks to click a custom button to scroll, it’s kinda janky, and you can’t scroll up again. It too scrolls too far, not overlapping items enough to leave you confident you didn’t just skip a headline.

This could be fixed quite easily: Just restore the native scrollbar.

The second problem is more fundamental, and on this issue I think Gawker are in some trouble. They’ve applied the same design to every site on their network. Huge banner image for the featured article, followed by smaller promos. It’s visually arresting and on io9 I think it’s really great. io9 regularly features great images: Screengrabs from movie trailers, comic books, scientific phenomena, or portraits of recognisable actors, or writers. No matter what they write about in a day, there’s almost certainly going to be some great accompanying photography and art to fill that space. The new design is a huge reward for their subject matter (and some credit needs to go to whoever there is responsible for curating it, because they pick good stuff.)

But this design is applied to all the sites in the network. Gizmodo and Lifehacker also have to fill this same, gaping space. Sometimes Gizmodo will get a story about a product that will justify that image: iPhone launch days will look great (not that they’re be there to report in person.) But in general, most new gadgets are uninspiring looking, there are few recognisable personalities, and no rich, illustrative art whatsoever. So the result is what’s seen above. Sparse screenshots of websites overlayed with GIGANTIC TEXT(reverbang.)

It’s made worse because the execution of this oversized lettering is also bad.

It’s application of generic design with no regard for the subject matter and content of the individual sites. It’s trying to brand a network over delivering a functional presentation. I’m pretty sure that’s covered in Design 101.

It’s a shame, because a lot of these ideas, whether they succeed or not are interesting and valuable research.

Updated on 2011-02-19: Redrafted the piece throughout, fixing various typing and phrasing mistakes.