Update: April Fool! See here.
Hey everyone, at long last it is time! We are FINALLY ready to unveil the much anticipated updates to our little site. The effort has lasted for months behind the scenes, led by talented designer Avani P and our amazing website administrator Chaitan Bandela.
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p>In designing a new website the first thing we wanted to do was to simplify the existing look. Over the years the front page of our site has become over-crowded with buttons and multiple tabs, and the text has become smaller. This new website is cleaner and promises to load faster, saving you precious seconds as you visit obsessively throughout the day. The font is nice and large so you don’t strain your eyes. Additionally, the banners at the top, while charming, had kind of lost their novelty. We have replaced the banners with new “branding” per Avani’s advice. Since we talk about monkeys so often at SM, we thought, “why not make a Macaca-like icon the new official logo/mascot,” so that we can use it to promote SM as a distinct brand. We are also in search of a social media consultant who will help us to better incorporate Twitter and Facebook with our site (no ghost Twitterers though). Stay tuned for that.
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We fully expect our readers to find bugs as they navigate the new site over the next few days and weeks. Chaitan will work as hard as he can to fix these bugs as we become aware of them. In the comments section below you can detail any such “brokes” you find. Please keep your comments focused on technical issues as opposed to artistic issues if you would please. Change is always difficult but research shows that given time the new look will soon feel as comforting as the old. We did run mock-ups of this new design by focus groups composed of long time SM readers whose opinion we trust before finalizing the new look. We also tried to mimic the best elements of other popular blogs and bring the site up to Web 2.0 standards. Thanks again to all of our readers for sticking with us as we approach our fifth year! And most of all thanks to Avani and Chaitan for their Herculean efforts!
Ah! A beauty to behold, Phew! It’s finally done. Ripples of contentment, Inside my head, Leaves me giddy.
Full of gladness, Open for business. Oh! What a day, Lord, I’m so happy.
Great work guys; I love the new look.
The new look is amazing… Just a little technical glitch I feel, can the Line Spacing in the paragraph text be increased a little… The lines seem to collide with each other… Just may be 120% or 125%???
Agreed on the spacing, otherwise it looks very nice!
Happy All Fools’ Day Homo Sepians :D!!
Where the monkey doll? I want me a monkey doll!
Nice! However firefox on windows has post titles appearing in smaller font than the text of the actual post. Maybe bold/larger font for post titles?
line spacing is a problem. suggestion: background highlighting of underlined text such as the handle is distracting. maybe it should be restricted only to hyperlinked text.
Holy crap it looks different! Yeah, agree on the spacing, and there’s something strange going on with the font size, but the redesign looks neat. Also, after entering comment text I was taken to a new page to enter text again (which excludes the original posting).
Dear Sepia Mutiny:
It has come to my attention that you have made an unauthorized use of my copyrighted work entitled Monkey Pokemon (the \”Work\”) in the preparation of a work derived therefrom. I have reserved all rights in the Work, first published in 1996, and have registered copyright therein. Your work entitled Sepia Mutiny is essentially identical to the Work and clearly used the Work as its basis. Specifically, the monkey logo to the left of your title is derivative of Young Monkey Pokemon and Infernape.
As you neither asked for nor received permission to use the Work as the basis for Sepia Mutiny nor to make or distribute copies, including electronic copies, of same, I believe you have willfully infringed my rights under 17 U.S.C. Section 101 et seq. and could be liable for statutory damages as high as $150,000 per infringement as set forth in Section 504(c)(2) therein.
I demand that you immediately cease the use and distribution of all infringing works derived from the Work, and all copies, including electronic copies, of same, that you deliver to me, if applicable, all unused, undistributed copies of same, or destroy such copies immediately and that you desist from this or any other infringement of my rights in the future. If I have not received an affirmative response from you by 4/15/2010 indicating that you have fully complied with these requirements, I shall be forced to take further action.
Very truly yours, Pey Loric on behalf of Satoshi Tajiri
Soo & Tosse, LLP 633 W. Fifth St., 13th Flr. Los Angeles, CA 90071
OMG
PONIESMonkeys.(as an aside, after the day passes, the website does not play fair with non-IE browsers, esp opera)
Perhaps I didn’t see it, but what happened to the news tab? I hope Sepia Mutiny plans on keeping the news tab, or at least something similar to it. It makes my mornings less boring. 🙂
I have to agree with the spacing issue, seems like it’s all crammed together, and secondly the options up top in the hindi style font are a tad difficult to read. What normally takes a second to click, now takes a couple more to decipher. How about making that larger too, or spacing it out?
On the technical aspect, I didn’t find any glitches as of yet.
I think the redesign could look really awesome, but I’m having issues with the fonts and spacing, too — both in Firefox on my Mac and in IE on my PC at work.
The post titles are smaller than the posts themselves, which makes the main page hard to read — it feels like all one huge post, with nothing broken up. And the background color of the links within posts crowd into the surrounding text.
After a better look, Please be informed. Rudimentary errors are aplenty. I have to express, Lavish contempt.
Feck this new look, Out with this change, Order back that old feel, Lastly: Fire Avani.
the earlier design was far better. isn’t this obvious?
So at the end of today, will you actually reveal a new redesign, or is it back to the old one? Nice April Fool’s attempt.
Yeah, this better be an April Fool’s joke – the look is so ‘bleh’. And the Hindi like font is so hackneyed.
Agreed. This may not be a problem though if this turns out be an Apr 1 gag. If that is the case, I commend you on the work it must have taken. Dame Edna just doesn’t wake up fugly every morning, y’know. Takes a lot of work.
kundik: let’s start the language riots like its the 1960s 🙂 happy april first!
Love it. But I have two questions…1) are you going to resurrect the t-shirt shop? 2) can I still go through the archive? I may be daft…but I can’t quite find it.
Oh, it wasn’t monkey dolls, it was monkey bars – my bad.
If it is a joke, I raise my glass to you for a job well done! If not, I think the old site appeared far more “mutinous” than this one. What’s with the Devanagari-type font ?
All the white space at the bottom of the front page is such a waste! I too hope like the others that this is an April fool’s gag. Bring back the old elegant look!!!
Like the redesign for the most part, but agree on the need for the post titles to be larger…it’s very hard to tell where new posts begin. Also, unfortunately, all the high-lighting is really offputting. It clashes on the right hand side and makes the posts look busy…I’m more likely to skip a paragraph that’s full of make-my-eyes-hurt highlighting than read it.
(And now that I’m on the second of two commenting pages…I’m glad I copied my comment, b/c after writing it on the main page and hitting ‘post’ you have to do it all over again on a separate page. Big pain.)
3rd attempt. i HATE it. it looks like a hindutva site with sankrit lettering and hanuman and the whole bit. hard to read. it does not recognize me. bring back the original banner. it had style, pzazz, intrigue. all of which the new one lacks.
Like the idea of “Devanagari” script. But where is the news tab ? As somebody mentioned above background highlighting needs to be improved.
Save your breath, folks… Obviously an April Fools joke.
Thanks for all the feedback folks. I’m working on them one by one. Multiple people have reported seeing two screens while posting comments. I’m working on fixing this.
Sorry about the not-so-smooth transition.
this is obvious a ploy to cash in on the upcoming elections in india by going more indo-centric. i can totally see the hand of some india-based junior programmers in this – heavy on techie, and low on design. and guess what, this is what the news sites have to say on the new blog roll out by the congress party.
it doesnt take a super brain to figure out what’s going on. While I am a little sad at the sell-out, I am happy at your recognition. Please remember though that the congress party has been responsible for many atrocities against the public. I recall the forcible sterilization, the seige on the golden temple, the emergency period. Are you sure you want to be part of this? Please take a moment to consider. Money isnt everything. Please remember the values of democracy, secularism, multiculturalism. Godspeed and good luck.
Old one was better. This one looks like something straight out of 1998.
I think the comment form is now fixed. You shouldn’t see 2 screens when posting a comment. If you are still seeing this issue, please send me your browser and operating system so I can reproduce the issue. Email me at chaitan [at] sepiamutiny.com.
Thanks again for your help.
The news section has been moved to the front page. It’s the third column on the right. But unfortunately, none of the old news stories are showing up. I’m working on fixing it. Thank you for your patience.
I like that it is brighter. But the font spacing makes it more difficult to read. Also, in the front page, I think the green ‘news’ section takes too much space. The monkey cartoon is fun, but it is kind of ‘hello-kitty’-esq.
This is tacky and awful. Please tell me it’s some April Fool’s gag. And I can’t believe that the “effort has lasted for months behind the scenes” – it looks like the handiwork of a color-blind infant. I hope you haven’t mailed Avani his check yet.
Sorry to rain on the parade but as a usability professional I have to say the new look is a step backwards. The back ground is too bright, the text has an all over effect which does not direct the eye to rest on specific functional areas to make the site more usable. Visually the colors don’t have a high contrast they seem to be in the similar tones of orange/brown. There doesn’t seem to be a hierarchy of visual presentation (blog post header, text, etc).
WTF
after that one time i congratulated a fat woman for being pregnant, i just stay silent when in doubt
Chaitan,
You and your lot had not one, but two, bloody months to get this right, and still managed to feck it up. Typical
IndianSouth Asian job. Pathetic; you all owe us an apology for this mess. Pathetic, you hear me?Fantastic work. Really like the color scheme. The pages are more readable too. Give my regards to monkeys, i mean, designers behind all this.
Maybe, I am going senile, couldn’t read the tab between ‘mutineers’ and ‘events’ as anything but ‘Shiv’ (Hindi), had to check the contents to decipeher it as ‘faq’
Again, if SM represents all of South Asia, why the Devnagari font? looks exclusionary even to South Indians like yours truly…
“guest blogger pardesi gori” would’ve been a good one
Now, you mutineers know that I am your biggest fan. So please don’t be offended if I offer some constructive criticism.
The problem with the mock-Devnagari font, a tired, old visual cliche from desi restaurant menus, is that you really have to know Hindi to make sense of it. So it goes against the inclusiveness of SM as senile #38 pointed out. You guys taught me to say South Asian instead of Indian. Now this!
Even if you know Hindi, you have to work at deciphering those words. The SM regulars would know, but what about your new readers? Why make it difficult for them? Patience wears very thin on the web, even more so than print. Companies spend a fortune dumbing down their web pages so that the user experience is absolutely effortless. (Just some advice from someone in this business.)
The visual gimmick simply does not measure up to the writing standards of SM, both of the bloggers as well as some of the commenters.
Being of your parents’ generation, I used to enjoy the sixties and seventies Bollywood photos in the masthead, but maybe it had run its course. What next? Why not something from the second-generation ABD experience because that’s what SM is all about? It would not alienate the DBD’s. They are here for what and who you are because there is surely no dearth of South Asian web sites on South Asian topics. I know you have introduced the monkey theme, but it is too much of an inside joke to grace the masthead of a public site like SM.
The names of commenters should be bolded as before.
I agree that the line spacing is too tight. In fact the font size is too big. The uncle-aunty crowd might appreciate that, but do most of your readers really need it? Smaller type with wide-open leading (in print, 10 points over 15) makes for a highly readable page.
The stark white page is quite soothing, but how about a little color somewhere?
I can imagine all the hard work that went into the redesign, but as my ad agency clients say after taking the entire campaign apart and making us look like complete idiots, “…just a few little changes and we’re there!”
Sorry, me no likey. I miss the kitschy headers. The spacing is off. There’s too much beige and brown highlighting happening.
Thumbs down.
This works great for increasing desi productivity 50%, even if only for one day.
after that one time i congratulated a fat woman for being pregnant, i just stay silent when in doubt
I done the same thing, more then once
Absolutely hideous interface…It’s an April Fool’s joke for sure, but it seems overly thought out and very unoriginal.
Me too, after asking a ‘fair’ friend’ whether her ‘dark’ father, who was standing next to their car, was her driver.
Just happened to think about it. Is it me or others feel it too – that on the contrary, knowing Hindi kind of makes it harder to read the English fonts for me. I am pretty sure if I did not know Hindi & would remove those top strokes above each alphabet ( I don’t know the Hindi name for it, in Bengali – we call them “matra”s), I will be comfortable in reading it well. My knowing Hindi kind of biases my superficial view when I look at it. So it is more a problem for Hindi-knowing readers than others, at least that is what I personally feel..:) While I totally agree as like many others – I hate the Devanagari font usage here & that it is a bit noninclusive to SM’s noble intentions behind the blog.
I am still praying that this turns out to be a fools-day-hoax!!
i dont like the new sepia! first: line spacing is way too small, the lines are smoshing into one another second: the monkey is colliding into the end of the screen third: monkey? i feel like it takes away from the whole thing, so random, even if you do talk about monkeys a lot fourth: i loved the banners! fifth: as oliveoyl says, it makes everything too hindi, too indian. and i’m indian-american myself so dont say i’m anti-indian sixth: this site looks soooo unproffessional! BRING THE OLD SEPIA BACK!
this had better be an april fool’s joke…
Happy April Fool’s Day, SM!
April Fools Joke’s are supposed to be funny, not annoying!