MTV and my old stereo. Separated at birth?
MTV now sports an interface that resembles my first stereo. First impression, it doesn't look unpleasant, but I would have expected something more groundbreaking from MTV. It seems to me that a lot of elements from the old design are still around, especially when you get deeper into the site, which creates a clash of styles. Not to bash it too much, for now, but the new branding is just bizarre. MTV now sports two logos next to each other. The new one hasn't been kerned, leaving the V separated from the MT. My friend Mike Cina, the owner of MTV's previous visual design, must be having a good laugh right now.
When good design goes bad.
2 Comments:
Hey this is Mike, wanted to add a couple cents in on this post. I think you are exactly right when you linked the picture of your old stereo next to this image. I felt the visual comparison was exact. That is what I thought of when I saw this design. It is horrible on many different levels, the grid, the design, the typography, the branding (what the hell happened up there on the left!!!!!!).
I also wanted to set some things straight. I worked with a team of people on this site. My main roles were typography and structure/grid/layout. Their last version wasn't the best design, but it worked and handled a crap load of content. More than most sites do. I often gave my opinion and a lot of advice was over run by who-knows-who, like every job. When it came down to it, I thought the last site was pretty ok as far as content management and you could read the text set in Verdana ("they" wanted to set text in Helvetica, but I kept setting my text in Verdana and insisting that it was used). I would like to get the chance for WeWorkForThem to redesign and art direct the MTV site from the ground up, we should be given that job. I don't think people understand the challenge of managing that much content. This new site shows how it can be done wrong. Enough said!
I don't think the new MTV redesign is all that terrible.
As Mike points out, it's a huge amount of content to manage. Still, I find it confusing when I see a site with what seems to be the entire page on the screen yet a significant amount of the content is sort of stuck below. It looks like anything "below the fold" is an afterthought.
And the one thing I always liked about MTV is their willingness to stick with the same logo...no matter how dated it gets. It looks like they might be getting cold feet.
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