tumblrs web designers are consistently working towards a trendy aesthetic with very little regard for user experience. “lets get rid of all the margin on the posts, that’s cool right?” change for the sake of change should never ever happen. the fundamental idea of redesigning a website is to allow users to access and enjoy your content more easily. in doing so, the new design ought to create a more intuitive flow, we shouldn’t have to think about where certain functions have been relocated. that is design. unfortunately yahoo has never fully grasped this idea, and i do not expect them to for a long time to come. 

oh no. what if they really do take this too far tho and delete our icons, or throw em in that last bit of whitespace on posts, then make that bit sticky instead. thats been a trend for a long time and tumblr hasn’t touched it so maybe we’re in the clear. tbqh i wouldn’t care if that happened on mobile, it makes sense on such a limited platform. rwd tends to inspire really boring stuff :/ ah well, we aren’t there yet. 

HEY but what if we took rwd the other way around and actually add features to platforms that have room for them. i guess it depends how big your monitor is, but generally speaking tumblr has a lot of extra blue on the sides. I know i know, this is an age old talk. There was that bit about not assuming mobile users won’t want to use every feature available.. 

Idk maybe that wouldn’t be so bad though. The next year or two is obvi going to have some new shifts in rwd, with WEAR and TV stuff. Maybe it’s time we gave these ui guidelines some much needed room to grow. 

The biggest thing that I’m looking forward to is advances in responsive image serving. I know it’s been talked about plenty in the past, but I’ve got a feeling that’s going to be a big topic this year. The doors that could potentially open could be really exciting. If things get good enough it could eliminate the NEED for minimalism. Nothing directly wrong with minimalism as a design choice, but when it’s treated like there’s really no other option is takes a bit of the fun out. 

It would be nice if there was a really really subtle animation when the icon switched. it seems to go from relative to fixed immediately. they couldn’t just throw a css transition on everything though i don’t think it works on positioning. maybe it could just be in js, half of this place is backbone.js anyway. so you could pretty easily animate it into place all nice and smooth and easing. probably wouldn’t get noticed a whole lot, but thats good ux right? but anyway it could also open up a bunch of possibilities for staff to mess with on internet holidays. It would be easy enough to make it bounce into place, that could be for like jello day or whatever. 

staff, what are your thoughts?