Quite frankly, all the white bothers me much more than the red. Otherwise I think the changes are great.

As you'll see tomorrow (at around 10:30am, hopefully), we've changed the color. It's definitely orange, although probably not the 2003-era burnt orange that some were hoping for. I've also shrunk the masthead by about 20%, and scaled back the use of the color as much as possible. (Lots of little adjustments here, but the overall result is that all pages -- especially the top regions -- are calmer.)

As for the brightness, it turns out that the white background wasn't the major contributing factor. (I'm now going to delve into deep design nerd-dom in here, unlike in New Look and the other tribes. But it's okay. It's my party and you'll cry if I want to.)

Remember that the older versions of the site also featured white backgrounds. The real problem with this design was the greys. The light grey background and light hairlines conspired to give each page a washed-out, too-bright feel -- almost like looking at an overexposed photo, or trying to perceive depth outside when everything's blanketed in snow. As you'll see tomorrow, darkening the light grey elements has resulted in an overall design that gives the eye much less work to do, because it doesn't have to constantly try to calculate which areas of the page are the lightest. The end result is less strain and fatigue -- an odd case of providing relief by increasing contrast.

These two issues were among my top priorities for tomorrow's release. You can read about the other dozen changes we've made here:

tribes.tribe.net/newlook/t...25bdf0e475