This new site is horrible. I joined SG in January, 2003, when it was just a year old or so. For the very first time since, I'm considering leaving. As so many others have noted this morning, the old place felt like a community. Now it feels like the bastard child of Facebook and New MySpace. Ugh.
The new design/layout is so unsettling from a visual (and navigation) standpoint, that I'm trying to imagine what possessed the designer(s). There is nothing "tight" about this design - there are huge icons floating across acres of open space, and rectangles of juvenile pastel colors that belong on Hostess snack cakes or in a 12-year-old girl's fluffy-bunny bedroom. The layout of each SG's photoset is cluttered and visually disturbing (each photo of the model is backgrounded by a low-opacity rendering of the entire set, as well as a row of thumbnails along the bottom, with no visual element in place to confine the viewer's eye where it belongs - on the model herself.) As one member said, when you walk in your office you don't even need to turn on the lights, just fire up the new SG and the whole room lights up from the mass of white space.
I've got 8 months to run on my membership, but I'm not sure I'm going to be able to adapt to this abomination.
Ugh.
