TIME for Progress?

Sometimes progress is bad. Take, for instance, the redesign of TIME's website Time.com.

Time.com is where I typically go for my news. They're less sensational than I found CNN to be and their articles are of a significantly higher caliber, since the writers produce simultaneously for print and web media. Unlike CNN, the articles are not updated throughout the day, so you don't get nonsensical duplicated sentences nor references to some official whose name is never situated (with a profession or a locale or anything) because that sentence was clipped on an update. The articles hold together and feel professional.

What I liked about the old Time.com was that you could quickly scan the homepage and see what was new - and thus quickly make decisions about what was worth reading. The slideshow of 5 featured articles was great. I could watch that and have a good idea what was what without even drilling down and reading the articles. The list of "new" stuff to the right of the slideshow was similarly accessible.

All that changed on Monday. The slideshow is gone, and the 5 featured articles are now 3 - only the first of which gets a picture. The "new" stuff section ("Latest Headlines") is smaller and no longer indicates when an article comes from the Associated Press rather than TIME's staff (AP writers don't have a clue what to do with English grammar, so I often eschew reading their reports). The layout is borderline garish. Design things to gripe about:

• In the first screenful of the site there are:
  • 7 different font sizes;
  • 2 different font colors;
  • 2 different font faces; and
  • 4 different font weights (counting italic as a weight, which is technically incorrect).
  
  
• There are 5 different sizes of photos - these appear in all columns.


• The three columns are the same width, but you wouldn't know it to look at them because the elements they contain vary in size so much.


• Each chunk in each column is of a height unrelated to those in the adjacent columns. There's never a place you can draw a line all the way across the page and feel like you've moved into a new section. Hence it looks like a disorganized mess.


• There's even a chunk that spans two columns, seemingly without any good reason. (That's the "New in Brief" chunk.) That forces a huge mess of white space below the featured article chunk. Ugly.

This is all with an ad blocker running, I should say - I can't imagine how bad it must look if you can actually see the ads.

Why do I mention all of this? Because the cacophony, which looks like something a kindergartner would produce, makes it nearly impossible to scan the page to see what's new and worth reading. I see it and my immediate reaction is "yuck!" I want to navigate away from the page. Kind of like I walk into Hecht's and want to run back out the door. Too much visual clutter. The old design may have looked - well - old, but at least it conveyed information in a way that was clear and concise and without excessive visual clutter.

Here's an opinion that matches mine, from a design professional. Here is one that disagrees (from another design professional). Obviously, some of this is subjective. But the fact that I thought for a moment that the CSS didn't load when I opened the page for the first time on Monday (because it looked so disorganized) should clue someone in that something is wrong with the site.

"Proof" that the new design makes me miss things: until I saw Austin Ramzy's blog post this morning about the milk scandal in China, I never knew that he'd posted an article on the same yesterday. That's kind of important to have been lost in the clutter on a redesigned website.

I wish they'd asked for feedback, first.

[Update] Two and a half weeks after the redesign of the front page and the main article pages, the new design still hasn't been pushed out to all of the sections of the site. Just click on the Elections section and see how it differs! Ridiculous.

The Alien Frigate

I finished modeling the Alien Frigate (the aforementioned big ship in my basement) and decided that it would be easer and better to just take pictures of the thing rather than try to organize all of the sections of it so I could get good renderings. So here it is, as a bunch of photographs rather than renderings.


The first picture shows the frigate "assembled," that is, as a ship, with all of its sections attached. It's huge, heavy, but surprisingly rigid. It has over 1300 pieces and is 26" by 29" by 6.6". It requires two hands to hold comfortably, but is nevertheless swooshable. You don't, however, get the feeling that it would be particularly nimble in a fight, so I included a couple of turreted guns (immediately above) to help fend off smaller ships. Woe to any foe who crosses in front of it - this thing is armed to the teeth.


Once landed, the frigate breaks down into the central structure plus four smaller ships: the half-saucers that flank the rear turrets assemble into a classic "flying saucer;" the drone, shown in an early post, is a combination of the port gun pod and the wing pods; the last two ships are LEGO's Warp-Wing Fighters which I modified so that the rear detaches. The pod/array on top of the central section opens to reveal another turret, a communications array, and a seat for an operator.


The flying saucer itself contains two guys and a little car, making it perfect for exploration. It's surprisingly fun to fly the thing around and even more fun to pull it apart, open it up, and transform each half of it into a little base. Because the tops open completely, it's easy to get to and put stuff inside the saucer.


Here's the rendering I did from the finished model. This is just the central section of the frigate (without all of the other sections attached). I like the color selection better on the rendering - not being constrained by what's in my collection and being able to think over the colors more carefully, I biased the overall scheme more towards gray. Seems more in keeping with the UFO theme.

The Alien Drone

There's the actual model for the drone that is part of the very large ship in my basement I mentioned in this post. The rendering is below. There are some important differences, which is why I wanted to post the photograph. Most striking, I think, is that not only are the translucent pieces the wrong color but also that the renderer completely fails to handle the internal transmission of light that causes the edge-on view of those pieces to appear brighter than their surroundings. In other words, from a certain angle, those pieces seem to glow.

As near as I can tell, this is a property of the fluorescent dye that is used in those pieces. You see a similar effect with the fluorescent orange LEGO pieces. There doesn't appear to be a way to specify to POV-Ray that a material is fluorescent. Likely as not, that's because they don't have any support for handling materials like that in the renderer: ray tracing is basically an enormous collection of hacks that attempts to take geometry and material specifications and turn out photo-realistic images. There's no such thing as a physically accurate ray tracer, so correct fluorescence would by necessity be a hack. Which is a pity, 'cause the fluorescent green LEGO pieces look really cool, in my opinion.


The other thing that's obviously missing from the rendering is the artwork on the printed pieces. That's because LDraw hasn't updated its part library in several years and many of the newer pieces (including the printed pieces from the UFO Series) are missing. Actually, many printed pieces from many of the themes are missing.