#but there's just...

Just a comparison of my dA profile frontpage in the old and the new design. Honestly, I don’t understand why adding a banner á la Youtube was necessary, considering you have to scroll up to see its entirety, and it just takes up a lot of space for no particular reason.

There’s just so many stuff to unpack here, considering that it actually feels less customizable than before. I’m no longer able to add my Journals tab since they’re now put together with status updates under Posts, so my Journals no longer show up on my front page. I can no longer add a Journal history either. The only option I have is to add another Gallery or a Featured artwork to the front page.

There are no more custom widgets, which was actually a feature for Core members, and they could add little text post that they could fill in with stamps and other little stuff made by other users (I never used them but I know that stamps were a big part of Deviantart fandom spaces).

The DeviantID is moved down, so people visiting are no longer greeted by the our little custom Bio pages, and on top of that, the artwork we upload there is going to be most likely buried by a “neat” little ‘see more’ button.

Like, I’m trying to get used to it since Deviantart is just a better site for my artworks (I get more traction on Tumblr, but let’s be real, the chances of anyone looking at my older artworks here is near zero. And it’s just better for archiving my comic too.) It’s just really frustrating, because this new design is just... not really user friendly. I can’t really put my finger on it, but it feels cluttered, and takes away organization options from us.

I can’t add a description to my subfolders anymore, so the little summaries I wrote for An Enigma in Shadows and my old fancomic, The BLU Torpedos? Gone. Kaput, vaporized, doomed to oblivion. I was able to sort my folders from Oldest first or Newest first, and move them around with a simple drag-and-drop. Now? I have to click tiny little arrows to move them.

There’s just... so much problems with the new design, if I had to write them all down right now, it would still fill a ten page essay. I looked it up, and this new design was in the works for more than a year. They still ended up rolling it out unfinished, since the Group pages, the Forum, and the Profile Settings are still in the old Design, just with the new toolbar slapped on the top.

I don’t think we will ever get an explanation why the new design had to be changed now. But honestly? I’m not surprised. Youtube enforces new and broken design changes every 3 months after all, no matter how much users complain. Facebook just put up a new design lately, and I had such a whiplash from it, I was glad that I was still given the option to change it back. I’m not even going to mention Tumblr’s design changes, I think we’re familiar with them.

I know next to nothing about web design, but it just feels like there’s a trend with all popular social media simultaneously wanting to push this weird, smartphone aesthetic that has a lot of dead space with web features that some browsers can’t even load properly. Like, you can’t just take what’s on the phone and shove it in the browser version. It doesn’t translate well. I use Tumblr while zoomed in, because otherwise I couldn’t see what’s on my Dashboard.