In Which the Pirate is Disappointed.

Bottom line up front: Because I know a number of people simply can’t use Ravelry anymore, I’m now also selling my patterns on Payhip.

So, this thing with the Ravelry redesign. It sure is a mess, huh. From the early days of “Surprise! we redid the site! Don’t you love it? …wait, you don’t love it?” to flat-out dismissing people’s health issues, only allowing positive feedback on the forums (locking/archiving/hiding anything negative or questioning, and even blocking people from the main forums for continuing to ask questions), and alienating people who helped build the community from the very beginning.

I’m lucky in that I’m not one of the people who’s had negative effects from the redesign. I found the original colour scheme and harsh drop shadows to be too much and stuck with Classic, but once they came out with the toned-down “Herdwick” theme I did switch over. I don’t think it’s great: many of the icons are meaningless; they use colours which don’t match the rest of the theme; things don’t line up; menus in the header open when the mouse passes over them (like when switching browser tabs) and stay open even when other elements of the page are clicked; it’s just not good design.

In short, I’m grumpy about this. Really, really grumpy.

There are so many things they could have done better, and they just… didn’t.