Input, a new tech news site

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/12/16/input-a-new-tech-news-site.html

3 Likes

Looks interesting. Might give it a go when their RSS feed is working properly.

4 Likes

What’s with the layout/format? It reminds me of Wired’s quirky attempt (“Hotwired”, I think?) from around 1998. It’s an immediate turnoff for me, and at least in the case of a few articles I looked at, seems to be intended to pad out some very sparse writing.

8 Likes

Yeah, that was seriously hard to read.

4 Likes

Scroll past unless made more digestible.

Good concept but, the design, hard to swallow.

1 Like

Yep - I agree with the last three posters. They need a nice condensed blog view, like BB’s.

ETA perhaps they are trying to be a new Verge. Whose site design, IIRC (not been there for a while) was once a bit like this (and may still be). The allusion in the first line of the ‘This is Input’ piece is surely not accidental:

What was once fringe (or, on the verge, if you will) has become mainstream.

3 Likes

Holy shit. That layout and typography is the worst. The 1990s called wants its shitty neon pink, low contrast, hard to read font aesthetic back.

There also doesn’t appear to be any RSS feed which is a non-starter to me especially with such a shit presentation.

3 Likes

Just tried it on my computer versus on my phone. Yup, not better.

9 Likes

Whoa, not to do a pile-up, but, well: pile-up. 40-year plus art director here and this is one of the worst site designs I’ve ever encountered. So much is wrong, though the elongated font in the logo is painfully, criminally bad (in a Fiverr sort of badness). The sad irony is that the design (and interface) opposes everything the site owners would hope for: encouragement to read the posts and also endurance, my impulse is to flee the site asap. Gosh, I genuinely feel bad for the design team.

4 Likes

God that GIF is so fab! (and fitting).

3 Likes

RSS please.

4 Likes

I suspect an HTML validator would puke all over it.

I’m glad to see I’m not the only one that had a difficult time with the layout. To be fair, it’s time for me to upgrade my glasses. When my eyes get stressed like this due to needing new glasses, I really notice which UI layouts are easy on my eyes and which add to my eye’s stress. This site really hurt my eyes and I barely made it to the second buy this shit section before I had to close the tab.

I assumed this was just me being sensitive but clearly others had various problems as well.

1 Like

I really dislike when sites arent optimized for mobile and crop the text on the left or right, so you have to rotate the screen to read it.

2 Likes

It’s almost no fair for everything to be working at once, but once I told Opera to not block ads and then Disconnect to not block Quantcast it’s as if only half the images load (not even 4bit flattened gray-pink halftones.) Are they truly on the other side of permitting Lotame and comScore? [Or, I wonder, is that only if I want FLASH tags implemented?]

3 Likes

Overthinking it Flossy. Bad design is sometimes just bad design.

1 Like

Surely we’re not learning anything if not even one of 8 shipments fail. [Flossal: Moves mouse Postal Agent: Steals batteries from mouse] Aw!

2 Likes

I hate when that happens! :smile:

1 Like

hmm, actually caught a whiff of OMNI Magazine layout.