Earlier today, with Knighty's help, Equestria Daily published its new layout.

Read my feedback below (C&D'd from the announcement itself):

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A few things I'll comment on.

 

1. The navigation bar atop really makes Equestria Daily much more convenient. Previously, we have to hit Command+the "up" keyboard buttons to navigate. Now, no matter how much we scroll down the page, the navigation remains on top. It's one really large annoyance now removed.

 

2. The tables are now very organized and very easy to see. Previously, the Trixie blue background made the entire blog blend. Here, we immediately realize what we should see first, creating a sense of hierarchy.

 

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A few things I would look further.

 

1. It's something I see all too often: The blog table is way too wide. I copied and pasted this line in the blog post, "Now I KNOW some of you guys are gonna love this. If you click the settings button to the right of the nav bar you can choose to," into Microsoft Word and checked the character count. There are 100 characters without spaces and 127 with, and that's way too much. Whether it's reading text on the screen or in print, after fifty-two characters, the human eye gets very tired reading the text and needs a break. What I recommend in the future is narrow the main blog table a little more. While the paragraphs may become longer, the human eye can rest much quicker.

 

2. While this color is akin to Thunderlane, it doesn't really feel like a FIM/brony blog anymore. Despite the pastel blue blending the blog, it made it feel like FIM due to the pastel colors being used. However, the color is cool and very dark. It tries to be bold, but not really a lot of fun. It's telling me is EQD and FIM, but doesn't exactly show it as well as before.

 

My suggestion here is to take a bold, cool pastel color that isn't distracting to the eye. Something like a dark blue similar to Luna, the dark purple similar to Twilight's stroke color, or another color out of Equestria Daily's original color palette (if there's a nice, calm pastel color).