Tumblr rolled out a redesign of the dashboard today. I’ve seen a share of positive and negative remarks made about it, the negative especially made clear through this post with just a touch over 1.7 million notes.

Here’s my honest, unbiased opinion of it.

The most striking thing is the obvious shift towards content discovery and consumption, carrying over since the inclusion of the Explore page, and the redesigned Spotlight page. It explains why the tags are the prominent feature on the right of your dash, and you have to dig deeper for things like follow counts on the pages for your own blogs that were there before today.

The good

• Overall, I think the design looks pretty slick. The drop shadows (fan or not) are consistent, and look better than the shadow used at the bottom of post blocks before the redesign. Features of the site have moved at different speeds, and now it feels these features have been brought together again, still keeping to that minimalist attitude that I’ve always admired in Tumblr.
• A lot of people may have a second blog, and the ability to have two blogs appear in the header of the dash will be a welcome treat for quick switching between the two. The interface for swapping them around works well.

The bad

• It would be nice to see some reorganisation of the Likes page. I use it like a bookmarking tool, and trying to find something that I liked a few months ago can be painful. Maybe organisation of Liked posts in a similar way to the archive view would improve this.
• The link to adding and removing followers directing to the /spotlight page comes across as a bit of a back-door push to get users to have a look. Good marketing technique, but then again, whenever I want to click on this link, I typically want to manage the people I follow, otherwise I’ll head straight to the Spotlight.

The ugly

• I run Chrome on Ubuntu, and the border radius rendering on the search box renders weirdly. Maybe this is a bug with Chrome, or my graphics rendering, but I can’t remember this happening with other parts of Tumblr or any other site.

• This a purely technical nitpick, but I’d like to see more HTML5 being used. I mean, shadows, border radiuses are all from the CSS3 spec, so I don’t see why HTML5 can’t¹ be implemented, especially in the playback of audio and video. I’d like to think that this is in the works.

A good point to make however is that the Internet-using public are generally allergic to change. I think Tumblr have done a fine job, but we see it every time Facebook push highly noticeable changes (e.g. pages like “If 1 million people like this page, Facebook will change back to the old layout”).

Then again, Tumblr has a lot of different uses by a lot of different people. Mine, and my reaction to the design won’t really align well with other peoples uses, especially that of the author of the article I linked to in the intro.

I think we’ll be fine. I’m looking at you Mr. Kalman; “Make something no-one hates, no-one loves it”.