DigitalLUX
Welcome to the Twilight Zone
The New Flickr Photo Page: Welcome to the Twilight Zone
Flickr’s new photo page has become a dark and dreary world: It has no light or life; It’s completely black. White space is nonexistent. We have gone from bad to worse, from light to darkness, from bright to dark, from cheerful to dreary. Flickr keeps insisting on eliminating white spaces from the website. Light, so essential to photography, is almost totally absent on the new photo page. It seems that the designers of these pages, ignoring the importance of white space and good design, have turned the photo page into nightmarish black hole that one even hesitates to enter. There is enough darkness in life and in the world to have Flickr turned the photo page into a twilight zone. All text is reverse now and difficult to read. Comments seem like an insignificant appendix on a side bar. There’s nothing under the photo. No up and down movement, only on the sidebar.
My biggest complaint is about the black with reverse text. This is not reader friendly at all. It may be great for designing websites with little text, but on Flickr there is a lot of commenting and reading going on all the time. This page design is probably the aborted child of a nonreader (the legions today allergic to books), because a reader would never design a page so anti reading and unpleasant to the eye as this one. Who wants to read and write on a black page with text in reverse? Now if you want to write more than one or two lines, who is going to stay on your page long enough to read it on a black sidebar on the right side of the photo page that minimizes the importance of comments? With the new page design we have one more reason not to comment and to spend even less time on Flickr.
Flickr seems to be autodestructing because they don’t listen to reason. Wisdom is in the counsel of many. They would not listen, even though a Flickr team member, Satish Mummareddy, said that they “have incorporated a lot of the feedback you have been sharing with us and we believe that Flickr’s experience is ready to be the default experience for everyone” . Well, I’m not sure that they really pay that much attention to what we have to say.
The buddy icon now is a port hole. We are all in the same dark and dreary ship, looking out, not through a large panoramic window, but through a tiny port hole. That port hole represents the whole experience on the new Flickr photo page. This new design is so claustrophobic and prison like that it serves to make us feel more isolated and distant from our contacts and the rest of Flickr, not closer and more in touch. Where is the improvement here? I want to know. Speed? Fine, we needed that, but not at the expense of functionality, user friendliness and a really appealing to the eye photo page.
Marissa Mayer said: “We want to make Flickr awesome again”. Well, the new photo page is certainly not the way to accomplish that goal.
Welcome to the Twilight Zone
The New Flickr Photo Page: Welcome to the Twilight Zone
Flickr’s new photo page has become a dark and dreary world: It has no light or life; It’s completely black. White space is nonexistent. We have gone from bad to worse, from light to darkness, from bright to dark, from cheerful to dreary. Flickr keeps insisting on eliminating white spaces from the website. Light, so essential to photography, is almost totally absent on the new photo page. It seems that the designers of these pages, ignoring the importance of white space and good design, have turned the photo page into nightmarish black hole that one even hesitates to enter. There is enough darkness in life and in the world to have Flickr turned the photo page into a twilight zone. All text is reverse now and difficult to read. Comments seem like an insignificant appendix on a side bar. There’s nothing under the photo. No up and down movement, only on the sidebar.
My biggest complaint is about the black with reverse text. This is not reader friendly at all. It may be great for designing websites with little text, but on Flickr there is a lot of commenting and reading going on all the time. This page design is probably the aborted child of a nonreader (the legions today allergic to books), because a reader would never design a page so anti reading and unpleasant to the eye as this one. Who wants to read and write on a black page with text in reverse? Now if you want to write more than one or two lines, who is going to stay on your page long enough to read it on a black sidebar on the right side of the photo page that minimizes the importance of comments? With the new page design we have one more reason not to comment and to spend even less time on Flickr.
Flickr seems to be autodestructing because they don’t listen to reason. Wisdom is in the counsel of many. They would not listen, even though a Flickr team member, Satish Mummareddy, said that they “have incorporated a lot of the feedback you have been sharing with us and we believe that Flickr’s experience is ready to be the default experience for everyone” . Well, I’m not sure that they really pay that much attention to what we have to say.
The buddy icon now is a port hole. We are all in the same dark and dreary ship, looking out, not through a large panoramic window, but through a tiny port hole. That port hole represents the whole experience on the new Flickr photo page. This new design is so claustrophobic and prison like that it serves to make us feel more isolated and distant from our contacts and the rest of Flickr, not closer and more in touch. Where is the improvement here? I want to know. Speed? Fine, we needed that, but not at the expense of functionality, user friendliness and a really appealing to the eye photo page.
Marissa Mayer said: “We want to make Flickr awesome again”. Well, the new photo page is certainly not the way to accomplish that goal.