redesign
Latest
The next phase of Engadget's evolution
A year and a half ago, I told you that Engadget's editorial mission was going to change. Since then, we've delivered on that promise, telling stories about how and why technology is affecting the world we live in. Our editorial evolution continued, but the site remained largely untouched. It's time our visuals caught up with our vision. And unlike Darwin, we didn't need any birds to show us the way.Welcome to Engadget 5.0.
Google+ has been completely redesigned with a focus on communities
Much like the Google logo before it, Google+ is being completely reinvented today. In a blog post, Google says that after pulling in feedback from users it has decided to focus the former do-everything social network around two key features: communities and collections. Collections launched earlier this year as a way to let users gather a bunch of content together around a single idea and share it with other users, while the older communities section encouraged users of similar interests to share "whatever you're into," be it food, sports, photography, the country of New Zealand, or anything else. The new version is rolling out today on the web, iOS and Android -- you'll need to opt-in if you're viewing it from your browser, and the apps don't appear to have gone live just yet.
Pinterest's redesigned profiles make it easier to find pins later
If you're an avid pinner, finding items on your Pinterest boards can sometimes be quite the chore. Thanks to today's update, though, you should spend less time hunting for what you're after. The online repository updated user profiles to show the items you're most likely looking for first. Recently pinned items and boards are now shown first, as Pinterest says users search for items they've added in the last month most often. You can also browse by topic from your profile or from any board. If you're perusing that "Healthy eats" board pictured above, for example, you can tap "salad" to narrow the results. You can also sort your boards according to which ones were to pinned to recently or in alphabetical order. The new features are rolling out on Android and iOS starting today, so you should see the tools soon enough.
Medium overhauls its collaborative publishing platform
Medium's management unveiled a radically redesigned publishing platform on Thursday including a host of new formatting and production features. These new writing tools include the ability to include Twitter-style @-mentions, additional text formatting options (including drop caps to start paragraphs) and a slick "TK reminder" that prompts users before publishing that they've forgotten to finish a thought and left a TK reminder in the text. Additionally, the company is rolling out a mobile publishing app for both iOS and Android, as well as a developers API so that the CMS can be integrated into other sites and apps. Medium has also made it easier to import existing blogs and publications into its custom domain system. Even the company logo received an refresh.
YouTube gives its iOS app a new look and in-app editing tools
YouTube has given its iOS app a full facelift, making it look a bit more like its Android counterpart. Now, the main page has three tabs on top: Home, which houses the usual recommended videos/channels, Subscriptions, which lists all the new uploads from the accounts you subscribe to, and Account, which shows a summary of your... account! It also comes with new in-app editing tools that you can use to polish videos to upload whenever you don't have access to professional software. In addition, serious YouTubers can get the refreshed version of the Creator Studio app for an enhanced Analytics section. The latest version's only available for iOS at the moment, but the Google-owned company promises that it'll soon be out on the Play Store.
Instagram tidies up web profiles with bigger pictures and less clutter
It may be a tad late for spring cleaning, but Instagram redesigned profile pages on the web to cut down on the clutter. On both mobile and desktop, profile pages, hashtag collections and your home feed are all getting tweaks to make things a bit neater. Desktop profiles, for example, nix the rotating image header up top and display larger images in rows of three instead of five. The changes get rid of the added boarders, button styles and more that the mobile app's redesign already updated in favor of a cleaner, flatter look. Not seeing the new design yet? Don't worry, it's rolling out now and you should be seeing it by the end of the week.
Netflix's website is suddenly sporting a fresh logo and brighter background
Netflix started tagging some of its trailers with a new logo around the start of May, and now it's part of changes on the streaming movie service's main website. The redesigned logo has replaced its predecessor at the top left, and the background is brighter than the last big redesign we can recall. A quick scan of apps on our various devices didn't show any changes there, and company spokesman Joris Evers tells us simply "The updated logo is gradually appearing in more places." So, are you as much of a fan of the new look as we are of The Magic School Bus? [Thanks, Colton!]
World of Warcraft finally integrates Night Elf ears
Lest you forget, with World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor, the older character models in the game will receive a huge visual update. Today Blizzard posted a preview of what the Night Elf female will look like come this fall, and it appears that she's due for more than her first change of underwear since 2004. "Overall, we've made her new model a little more defined, made some of her proportions a bit more realistic, and added a bit more muscle tone," the studio wrote. "We wanted to visually communicate that she is a fully capable warrior huntress, and small details like muscle definition help highlight that." One interesting fact about this makeover is that the Night Elf ears will finally be "fully integrated" into the model itself instead of being separate pieces that were tacked on to the head.
Spotify for Android welcomes a darker theme in latest redesign
Earlier this month, Spotify let it be known that it would be implementing a redesign across its desktop and mobile properties, which it described as being the most dramatic change since 2008. As part of this, those of you with an Android device can now, finally, see what iOS users have been enjoying for the better part of April. Aside from featuring a darker theme, Spotify's latest redesign is also about putting more content in front of you, meaning that albums and tracks are now better highlighted throughout the application.
Expansions, redesign, and the balance of WoW
Between Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria, the warlock class saw a near-total redesign that, at this distant remove, we'd have to admit was a runaway success. Class redesigns are always a risky proposition - the dilemma is always between those who find the class reinvigorated and those that liked the class as it was, who now find it unfamiliar and undesirable to play. The reason I bring this up is because lately, while playing Reaper of Souls, I keep thinking about that warlock redesign and the fact that in RoS Blizzard managed to take a game people generally felt was an unsuccessful sequel and change it in a variety of ways, and in the process so utterly remake people's opinions of it that we get reviews like this in Forbes. This has me thinking about whether or not World of Warcraft is going to see this kind of radical redesign in Warlords of Draenor or not. On the face of it, we're aware of a lot of changes coming - the removal of reforging, stats like hit and expertise, the deflation of stats on gear, health and healing changes - but there's still a lot we don't know about how thorough the redesign of the game is going to be. Now, to be fair, RoS didn't make any significant mechanical changes - certainly nothing as dramatic as the warlock redesign was. And the warlock redesign came at a time when talents were completely overhauled as well. Clearly, there are various kinds of redesign in any expansion, but how does Warlords of Draenor compare? While we don't have a complete answer, we can compare it to previous expansions.
Should there be another kind of five player dungeon?
The first dungeon I ran in World of Warcraft was the Deadmines. Not the Deadmines we have today, of course, although the layout is largely unchanged, but the original, Edwin VanCleef helmed Defias operation. From there, it's been a lot of years and a lot of dungeon crawls (not just in WoW, either - I've been crawling around in dungeons ever since the Caves of Chaos were build adjacent to a Keep on some Borderlands) and so I've come to have some opinions on dungeon design and variety that I think are worth nattering on about. In general, some of the dungeon complexes released with the launch of World of Warcraft took labyrinthine to new extremes. As much as I love it, Blackrock Depths is a positive pain to navigate for a new party - it was terrible before the dungeon finder existed, it's not any better now. Modern dungeons tend to have moved as far away from the 'sprawling mega complex' design as possible. Current dungeons tend to be what I call 'bite sized' in comparison - smaller, self contained wings or experiences that contain between three and four bosses, to be consumed in a 20 to 30 minute chunk of time with four strangers via LFD. It's understandable and even unavoidable that this had happened, but I think there's some wisdom in considering how to have a happy medium between these extremes. Dungeons like Dire Maul, for instance, saw minimal change in Cataclysm because it was already perfect for the new system. Three wings, mostly self contained (one could previously get from north to west via a tunnel into the library, which was removed) with a reasonable assortment of bosses, tied together by theme yet distinct in terms of what you faced in each. Maraudon, on the other hand, is still a sprawling, difficult to navigate dungeon made worse by the addition of incredibly arbitrary starting locations that the dungeon finder only exacerbates.
Spotify's quest to get it 'just right' through balanced design
In the heart of Stockholm a team of designers and engineers have been hard at work, mostly in secret, overhauling one of biggest names in music. (And no, we're not talking about Icona Pop or even an ABBA reunion.) On Birger Jarlsgatan, a street that divides the neighborhoods of Ostermalm and Norrmalm in the Swedish capital, sits the home of Spotify. Not all that long ago it was the undisputed king of subscription music services. Today it is just one of many major players in the exploding marketplace with would-be usurpers, from Google to Beats, surrounding it on all sides. Over the years it's shoehorned in new features and accelerated its international expansion, but the design stagnated. Its iTunes-like desktop client didn't just look dated, it was cumbersome and many of its features bordered on obsolete. Its mobile apps and web player filled a need, but lacked the polish and stability many mainstream customers demanded. So for the last several months a team led by Michelle Kadir (Director of Product Development) and Andreas Holmstrom (Lead Communications Designer) have been toiling away to bring Spotify into the 2010s. That means a flatter more playful look with soft edges and large images. But the company also bucked the trend towards lighter color palettes by slathering its UI with enough black to make Tomas Skogsberg proud.
Spotify's new design is cleaner, darker and puts the focus on content
If you're using Spotify on the web, desktop or iOS you should notice a pretty massive change starting today. (The new look should be coming to Android "near future.") The company is launching its most dramatic overhaul since its launch in 2008. Most noticeably, it's flat and dark. Like Swedish death metal dark. The gray and white elements it experimented with over the last couple of years have been banished and it has returned to its roots with a UI that is primarily black and slightly lighter black. Sure, there are still green highlights and the new rounded (dare we say finger-friendly) icons are a lighter shade of gray, but the overall effect is one where the most important element -- the content -- jumps off the background.
World of Warcraft shows off the 'redesigned' female Draenei
For far too long, Draenei have existed as bastions of unassailable beauty and elegance in World of Warcraft. We're told the race has fallen to the depths of the Broken and the Lost Ones, but you don't really see that in the game. Fortunately for fans, the new redesign to the female Draenei shows a closer connection between the various subtypes of the races, while simultaneously emphasizing the roots of the game's resident space goats. (Those roots would be "space" and "goat," incidentally. Truly.) Among the major changes Blizzard threatens to make to the model are the addition of fur, a slimming of the lower legs and hooves, and the removal of the ridiculously long tail from the model. The eye design also speaks to the ways in which this ancient and mystical race sees things in a way that most of Azeroth's residents can only imagine. It's a bit more of a departure from the existing model than the other redesigns, but take a look at the full diary for a closer look. And then remember what day it is. You don't need to reroll your Shaman as a Dwarf. We promise.
Shazam is now more social and better-looking on iOS, Android is next
As part of an ongoing major redesign on mobile, Shazam has just rolled out a new version of its iOS app. Adding to the changes we saw last month, today's update focuses on offering improved social sharing features, an even better lyrics experience and a more polished UI throughout the application. Users will now see in-depth artist biographies, redesigned album and song pages, as well as the inclusion of videos for songs. Shazam also points out that the app was also tweaked to have enhanced audio recognition and suck a little less power out of your iDevice -- much like Skype did recently with one of its apps. The update is initially only available for iOS, but the Android crowd can expect these revisions to come "in a couple of weeks."
Daily Roundup: Bitcoin founder unveiled, Facebook's redesigned feed, and more!
You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
YouTube makes finding and following others' playlists easier, debuts new card design for the web
We figured changes would be afoot after Susan Wojcicki (former chief ad guru at Google) became the head of YouTube, and it turns out, the first ones made since she got the job are all about playlists. Henceforth (or at least until the next round of UI tweaks arrive), the left rail on Youtube.com will have a dedicated "Playlists" pane that shows your personal playlists along with those from other channels that you've liked. Additionally, users will find a new "Playlists" tab on channel landing pages and get a new dedicated playlist editing page. The new features are rolling out worldwide over the next few days, and with them comes a new responsive, card-style design that fits "neatly on any screen size," per the company, and should feel familiar to folks who use YouTube's mobile apps. One YouTube for all, yo.
Twitter's latest test channels Pinterest and Facebook in profile redesign
That mobile-esque redesign Twitter pushed out last month? Forget about it: the microblogging is already testing another skin for user profiles -- and it looks really familiar. Select users are reporting that their Twitter profiles look now look like a cross between Google+, Pinterest and Facebook, complete with large header photos (up to 1500 x 1500 pixels), left-aligned profile images and flat content cards representing each tweet. The entire redesign is a jarring departure from the Twitter norm, but it's that last element that proves to be the most disruptive: rather than piling up in the normal vertical fashion, the new card layout allows tweets to lay side by side, a fundamental change in how Twitter displays content. There's no word yet when or if this profile will available to the majority of Twitter users, but be warned: change is upon us. [Thanks, @Ben_Haizlip!]
Plex website relaunches as Plex.tv, one-stop home for all of its media streaming abilities
Plex has grown rapidly over the last few years and its increased focus as a cloud service for your pictures, videos and music has resulted in a relaunching of the main website. Now hosted at Plex.tv, it ropes in the four disparate sections of the previous website, bringing features like Plex Pass subscriptions, myPlex server and account management and Plex/Web content access together. The web app has been redesigned to make access to your media remotely faster and prettier, and even ditched the previous need to sign in three times (site, web app, your server) for full access. Of course, there are some features currently missing and others that need to be tweaked in the new version, but with easy access to toggles like a Chromecast button at the top right, we think most will find it a welcome upgrade.
Trion Worlds overhauls RIFT's Iron Pine Peak
Mid-level RIFT players have a new place to adventure after the game's 2.5 update; Iron Pine Peak has been completely redesigned. According to Trion Worlds, the zone has been rebuilt from the ground up with the challenges inside being tweaked to accommodate players from levels 27-35 instead of 40-48. The questing content has been reworked, with main story arcs being marked more clearly and providing greater rewards. Additionally, kill quests have been converted to Carnage quests and paths through each set of quests have been streamlined to reduce repetition. Trion explained that the zone's level requirements were reduced so that RIFT players would encounter the Storm Legion storyline earlier in their RIFT careers, and so that give mid-level players more freedom in how and where they level. Trion originally planned to rework Iron Pine Peak before RIFT's initial launch but put the plan on the backburner due to the risk of changing so many things so close to release.
