For what it’s worth I come at this critique reluctantly. I’ve been a graphic designer and User Experience director for twenty five years. In 2010 I stepped away from the discipline to become a working photographer but the design instincts and judgement (good ones I think) remain strong.
As a matter of principle I was always reluctant to be critical of an existing design when quizzed by clients or potential clients because without understanding the creative brief behind that design, the budget, delivery time line and personalities involved you could never say why a particular site, publication or visual behaved and looked the way it did. There were simply too many unknown variables for it to be fair.
I can also say that clients changed identities or communication strategies because they were bored with them, or a new creative director wanted to put his or her stamp on the organization with little substantive evidence to support the assertion the current approach was failing. I suppose I was grateful for that institutional itchiness but it often gave me pause. Good design is not window dressing after all (which I must say is categorically unfair to window dressers everywhere).
When my career became more focused on interactive design and usability I was delighted to see the quality and quantity of user feedback increase dramatically. There’s nothing more sobering than watching real users navigate a new prototype and repeatedly fail even under the supportive guidance of experienced user researchers. In a responsible, multi-disciplinary process designers and developers take this feedback seriously and have to go back to the prototyping tools and source code.
I’m still coming to terms with the new design but I think I can say (fairly) that it has a problem with emphasis. Nowhere is that more apparent to me than in the right hand sidebar. I believe the thumbnails have marginal value. For every good one that’s illustrative of the story, three of them will add no value or be so small that their contribution is non existent. Meanwhile they add a significant amount of noise when scanning the column for interesting diaries.
Your usage may differ but when I’m using DKos I do a quick scroll of the front page diaries (looking for Hunters or Meteors or Joans etc)… then it’s over to the sidebar in search of something meaty from the faithful. I just don’t find DK5’s sidebar as easy to scan as DK4s.
I created a quick comp of an alternative without benefit of the DK5 typeface. It quiets the typography, reduces the contrast of the horizontal separators and splits the author and ratings with left/right justification. It fits more diaries in vertically without feeling claustrophobic and reduces awkward, staccato line breaks with a longer line length.
I’ve always valued the popup tooltips when hovering the diary titles, I like the new style.
Finally it’s worth repeating that visual emphasis is the result of difference. You’ll note there is only one bold word in this diary making it easy to spot. Emphasize too many individual elements and they all compete and hence nothing is truly emphasized. A bold new design does not have to overdo the bold. Dial it back a bit on the surface and all the work that you’ve done under the covers will be appreciated. I’d say this was my two cents but my hourly rate is considerably more expensive.