User blog comment:LordTBT/Less is More:A Main Page Upgrade/@comment-5454372-20170307073141

I actually honestly prefer the 09-2012 design overall compared to the other three linked designs (late 00s, 2015, and current one as of March 7 2017). It has to do with the overall whitespace balance and size of the visual content.

(Before I go further, it's probably worth mentioning that I'm viewing Wikia from a 1920 x 1080 screen, and I mainly look for links to detailed pages)

The latest design improves on some of the older ones by keeping the content aligned into neater blocks laterally (not so much in terms of its balance going up-and-down, which I'll elaborate on below), while the design from the late 00s gets some asymmetrical white space between them when viewed fullscreen from my desktop.

Where it's decreased in visual quality is in the whitespacing within each block of content: the dimensions of the thumbnails vary significantly (most being landscape orientation, but two which are clearly portrait orientation captures of novel covers), which is creating very inconsistent levels of space between the top and bottom of its accompanying text description (in, notice how the whitespace is mostly consistent in each block, but the whitespace for the "film project" block is several times the height of its accompanying text). This is also causing the sizes of each sub-block to vary significantly, which doesn't look as pleasing as if they were consistent (case in point: if you're on a desktop, look towards your right at the "popular blog posts" module, and how each blog preview is kept at a similar height).

Also worth mentioning is that the of some of the text sizes is quite cramped (the letters of different lines are actually touching in that screenshot), which is visually unappealing and makes that part of the page feel cluttered (and because there's too much space on other parts of the page, the balance feels very off, and the viewers' gaze doesn't move naturally across the screen).

Edit: another thing which just came to mind, but notice that the headlines/page titles in each of those blocks are at a font size where they're taking up 2-3 lines by default. I'm personally not very fond of that, especially when compared to how the 2012 version of the page was neatly fitting nearly all of the titles on one line. While I realise that you've probably increased the text size to help fill up the white space in each section (due to how you've removed preview text from the article itself to minimise how much text is on the page), I feel like the enlarged headlines is just visually jarring overall. With the 2012 format, readers could simply choose to read the headline, then skip down to the next block if they so desired -- it wasn't very hard visually because the headlines were larger than the preview text and also blue links, which made them comparatively easy to pick out and focus on at a glance.

I respect what you're saying about going for a simpler interface and a more minimalistic look, but I don't feel like the current design as of March 2017 promotes the best of aesthetics and a steady reading rhythm -- at least, not for people viewing from desktops. The 2012 design had much more consistent spacing and promoted a much smoother rhythm for the gaze to focus on and follow, which made it a much more pleasing experience for me to read (the 2017 design forces me to reel back my gaze to take in the whole of the big thumbnails, and then refocus back to a smaller area of the screen to take in the differently sized words -- I'm also moving my eyes across irregular patches of spaces between the content).

I can respect if you feel differently about the page design, but this is some feedback from someone with a differing opinion on the page and website design in general.

(This entire reply itself also makes for a good example of what I meant with the incongruous block sizes -- look at how the comments below this were of a similar size, and then along comes this one gigantic block of content which completely destroys the visual balance of the reply blocks...)