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The fantastic Middle-East-centric blog Mere Rhetoric has a new look:
You’ll notice that MR has a new, cleaner design (if you’re still getting the old orange-yellow elements hit F5 – the new corners aren’t loading automatically for some people). Readers were never entirely comfortable with the previous build: a few minutes after it went up one of the more prominent JBloggers kicked over an email acknowledging the new design but questioning marginal decisions like the color scheme, the type face, and the banner. Subsequent emails from readers included phrases like “I can’t read anything,” “clever in 1999,” “are you colorblind,” and “worst ever.” Really. Last week the good folks at Doc Weasel (very strong NSFW content warning, especially for anyone born before Carter lost Iran to political Islam) sent me over one of the kindest critical emails I’ve ever received about anything. It included a half-dozen quick fixes plus a brand new stylesheet and banner. When people are taking the time to redesign MR just to make it less painful for them to read it’s probably time for a new design.
Things that have changed, almost all at the suggestion of the Doc Weasel folks:
(1) All the yellow-orange elements are gone
(2) The link colors are different
(3) The rollover effects on links have been removed (this was a popular reader request that I’ve held off on fulfilling – those lines were near and dear to my heart)
(4) The font is different
(5) The thick black border is gone
(6) There are no more dotted lines around the navigation bar at the top on individual posts
Hey, we’re happy to help, and you really give us too much credit, but thanks, and thanks for the great blog. They didn’t actually use the banner we designed for them (seen above), but that’s ok. Glad the style-sheet and design elements worked for you guys, and we’ll enjoy your blog all the more!