Opinions Needed

Hello Everyone - we have a new designer that has taken on some tasks, he isn't finished just yet but the concept is there in that he has used masonry format to display photos in the Explore tab. We wanted your opinions/feedback on the following 2 URLS:

 

Current Editors' Pick design: Editor's Pick | Photo.net - be sure to click on a photo to see the current modal.

 

Proposed Editors' Pick design: Photo.net - Where Photographers Inspire Each Other - make sure you click on a photo as the modal design is different as well.

 

Again, he is making a few additional nips and tucks here and there but the general concept of masonry format is there.

By far the new.

I prefer the old, the new is too bright & busy so it takes away from the image IMO

I prefer the old. Both suffer from the same issue of portrait oriented images being reduced dramatically in size as compared to landscape orientation, however in the new format jamming more photos in each rows make the portrait photos even smaller. The new format with the sidebar is nice in as much as it makes the area to comment more obvious and there is no need to scroll to see where it is. If the new format had fewer and larger images per row you may be onto something. As stands it's one step forward, one step back for me.

The 'new' mosaic layout effectively uses more screen real estate--at the cost of stretching quite a few photos. It is understood (if not liked by some) that the older presentation crops images--but they are not distorted. This may be a difficult idea for the masters of PN to grasp--but such distortion for the sake of mobile users or screen real estate is a form of disrespect to the photographers who made the image--and the image itself.

 

I would like to offer a suggestion. Before management worries about what color the curtains in the window are, how about fixing a litany of well documented problems the site has with basic functionality?

The 'new' mosaic layout effectively uses more screen real estate--at the cost of stretching quite a few photos. It is understood (if not liked by some) that the older presentation crops images--but they are not distorted. This may be a difficult idea for the masters of PN to grasp--but such distortion for the sake of mobile users or screen real estate is a form of disrespect to the photographers who made the image--and the image itself.

 

I would like to offer a suggestion. Before management worries about what color the curtains in the window are, how about fixing a litany of well documented problems the site has with basic functionality?

 

PapaTango - we are, however they are different people doing different tasks. We gained access to a new designer and that person has nothing to do with the overhaul of Member Center which is underway.

The new, though I wish the background on which the images are displayed was darker (not as dark as the current version though).

Thanks for providing the opportunity for feedback, and that's great news that changes are in the works.

 

I wanted to like the new format, but here’s the problem. When I looked at the proposed format, I was instantly distracted by the photos themselves, in a bad way. My first thought was that the quality of the editorial selection had seriously deteriorated—a number of the images had blatant compositional flaws that made them seem almost like random snapshots…I was frankly surprised that they’d made it onto the page. I then looked at the other link, and saw a collection of really fine images, superbly composed and well-selected. But they were the same images. At that point I realized that a number of the photos on the proposed page had been arbitrarily cropped, and the cropping had strongly degraded the quality of the images. That’s a very serious problem, since the composition of an image is largely what carries its artistic intent, and photographers often put more effort into composition than into any other aspect of making a photo. An arbitrary crop, in effect, defaces the image, sometimes turning it into an ugly caricature of what the photographer had intended--and that impacts the reputation of the photographer. I think we all want visitors to the site to be favorably impressed, and maintaining the quality of the publicly presented images is critical to making that impression. Would it be possible to modify the new design to allow the images to be presented in the form the photographers intended?

thank you all for the feedback - i shared it with the designer and he's going to go back to the drawing board in effort to address your concerns as it relates to cropping and on the modal (detailed view) use the photographers preference used in their portfolio (light vs dark) background. Also - creating a way to view comments in the modal as well as compose comments. He said it will take him a couple of days so hold tight for now and hope to have something new to share by Monday.

Either would do the job for me as long as the photos come up uncropped and the way that I uploaded them much as noted by Leslie above;..this is true not only for Editor's pick but on all platforms where one's photos are uploaded for others to view and this is very pertinent in the CONTEST platform where one is asked to vote on an images altered by arbitrary crops.

The 'new' mosaic layout effectively uses more screen real estate--at the cost of stretching quite a few photos. It is understood (if not liked by some) that the older presentation crops images--but they are not distorted. This may be a difficult idea for the masters of PN to grasp--but such distortion for the sake of mobile users or screen real estate is a form of disrespect to the photographers who made the image--and the image itself.

 

I would like to offer a suggestion. Before management worries about what color the curtains in the window are, how about fixing a litany of well documented problems the site has with basic functionality?

PTL