New Mibba, My Take

Yeah, I know it happened a week or so ago, but I've been busy, okay? Anyway, this new Mibba. I don't think the new layout is a really revolutionary, knock-your-socks-off kind of change, but that's probably a good thing. It still looks like old Mibba, but better. There's things I like about it, and there's things I don't like about it. Most of the things I don't like are really nit-picky and probably don't bother anyone else but me. This is just sort of a brief run-down of my opinions. Keep in mind, I'm a student in graphic design, so I will be more critical. :P

Things I Like:

The entire layout is good. It looks a lot more clear, and a lot more modern. Old Mibba's graphics were a lot of fuzzy-looking images that were probably low-quality gif images. This one looks a lot more sleek without so much pixelation in menu bars and text. I like the little graphics for messages, profile, etc. The colour scheme is nice as well, the blue and orange made it look a bit old. The alignment and spacing is really good as well. It's clear that it's content-based and things are meant to be read on it. Generally, it is a good layout.

The previews are awesome as well. Very helpful. I hate misspelling crap and not realising it.

Things I Don't Like:

Something that doesn't bother anybody else: The general font. I'm not sure what it is I'm typing in right now, or what it is in the nav, but it's sort of a general rule that serif fonts are not good for web. It's just that the serifs are so small and pixels can't accommodate the right shape of them. It doesn't look bad necessarily, but sans serif fonts (like Helvetica, Arial, Gill Sans, Myriad, to name a few) are easier to read on screens. But this one being used is actually not bad. It's not like Times or something.

Another thing that doesn't bother anybody else: the Mibba Creative Writing link does look a bit blurry. It's a gif image, which isn't great for images of text. A jpg or png would have been fine because it's so small. And the vector art of the girl I have never been fond of, and that's a personal thing and really isn't a critique of the website at all. There's nothing wrong with her, I just don't like her. I don't know why.

Tiny, little things nobody on this Earth cares about: The footer is kind of bare. The nav has a lot of things on it that may not be necessary. The background are two colours that are very slightly different from the blue content background so there's a weird little line between them.

This is pretty much just a critique of the look rather than functionality. I can say there's nothing wrong I've come across with the way things work on here. There's nothing super amazing either. It works, that's all there really is to say about it.

The only thing I'm curious about is why it's been like two years since the first announcement of "New Mibba". It doesn't take two years to build a website. But it doesn't really matter, I guess.