UPDATE:
Since this is surprisingly high on the trending list at this point, with a lot more engagement than I expected, I thought I’d make an edit. First of all, thanks for the recs and the constructive discussion in the comments. Second, those working on the site have indicated in the comments here and elsewhere that they are aware of some of this, and will have some fixes in before too long (though I wouldn’t expect anything before the weekend is over).
So take some time to thank the staff giving us updates and working on things to the best of their ability. Things will probably look different a week from now. Who knows, maybe even the story titles won’t be so GINORMOUS at some point. But the Rec buttons will no doubt be fixed soon.
Original diary content below the line:
I’m not even going to get into the rather extreme difference in font sizes between the HUGEMONGOUS titles and the tiny diary text and comments I see after the site update, while browsing this site on a 12.9-inch iPad Pro. Aside from mentioning that it makes the site barely usable without jacking up the page zoom to 125%, which I’ve never really needed to do before. This of course makes the titles even more gigantic, and makes the main page look ridiculous.
But this business about no longer inverting the color of the “Recommend” button… From my perspective, that was not a good idea. First of all, the font on the Rec button itself is somehow even tinier than the tiny font in the diary body. And now the only difference between a recced diary and one that I haven’t recced is... the letters “Un” in front of the “recommended”. In a super tiny font.
Even if the star changed from an outline star to a solid star, that would be… something. Inadequate to really be visually obvious like the old “filled” button on a recced story, but better. But the star also does not change, it’s solid before and after reccing.
Please bring back some sort of more visual way to show that a story has been recced, or I’ll probably stop bothering to try to squint at the screen looking for the magical “Un” to figure out if I’ve recced something or not, and just not “rec” things anymore. Which I’ve been doing much more than I used to, for a couple of years now.
And, you know what? I will get into it: I would really appreciate it if the font size differences stopped being so extreme. I’ve never understood why the titles on this site are displayed in such an enormous font size relative to the body text, but the difference has become much larger between the titles and diary bodies with this recent update. And yes, you can implement custom fixes to a site that has weird font size choices with browser plugins, if all you ever use to browse the site is a desktop browser. But on mobile devices, even a big iPad that is theoretically using the “desktop” version of the site, the only fix is just increasing the page zoom so the body text is readable.
There is generally no good reason in web design for titles to be more than a few font sizes larger than the text on the rest of the page. But the titles I’ve always seen on this site, on various types of devices, are more like ten sizes larger than the body text. If I increase the page zoom to make the body text readable, you could read the titles on my iPad screen from across the street, with me standing inside one Starbucks and you standing inside the nearest Starbucks. You can laugh at that if you want, because it is certainly phrased as an amusing and seemingly facetious reference to how many Starbucks there are, but I actually mean that somewhat literally.
With all that being said, I’m sure those (hopefully a multi-person team?) working on the site have quite a difficult job in front of them, and I’m appreciative that you’re trying to get some things more up to modern standards. But I’m being pushed to my limits on the usability issues I can keep ignoring at this point. The site is quite literally becoming annoying to browse/read, and judging from the comments on other diaries, I don’t think I’m completely alone in wondering what is going on with the font sizes.
The fact that people are even talking in diaries here about the “sledgehammer” approach of having your desktop browser force the site to use a different font (and even replacing all “sans serif” fonts with a non-sans font in a way that would affect ALL such fonts on ALL websites) is a pretty bad sign that something is not right about the current design.
By the way, if you read that recent diary, there are much more elegant approaches with plugins if you are using a desktop browser like Firefox or Chrome. You can completely change the fonts and font sizes of any element on a specific website using the right plugin/add-on/extension. But the problem really needs to be fixed at the source.