Took a bunch of screenshots & a video to show what happens as you scroll down since its offline now.

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MBZ8P7lm0A

http://socialblade.com/c/2011-06-13_1712.png

http://socialblade.com/c/2011-06-13_1713.png

http://socialblade.com/c/2011-06-13_1713_001.png

http://socialblade.com/c/2011-06-13_1713_002.png

http://socialblade.com/c/2011-06-13_1714.png

Sure looks ugly, I hope that was a joke. Navigation doesn't look to easy.

Hmm. Am I the only person who actually likes it? I mean, to me it looks very incomplete but I really like the design concept with the pixel art and pixel gradients everywhere. The site as it is right now looks like dogshit to me, so this is pretty refreshing. Engadget looks marvelous as well. I'd like to give these guys the benefit of the doubt and assume it's a work in progress.

I love it. The slightly-too-intensely overlapping elements and colors are outrageous in a way that really appeals to me. TechCrunch gets accused of being a brash loud thing, and its fun to see them basically scream that to the mountaintops with the way they present themselves visually.

I also like that it harkens back to the aesthetics of earlier net culture publications (well, to Wired). Seeing text overlaid with bright big blocky backgrounds on top of photos with huge comedy swaths of pixel coloring everywhere brings me back in a very positive way.

I like the idea of it, but something feels wrong about the implementation, something about how it feels, can't put my finger on it though. I think it's potentially how they've taken the idea slightly too far, the text doesn't feel the focus enough (from the small amount I've seen)

Also the lack of adverts is proof it's a very early idea/prototype, proper design includes careful positioning of adverts for effective advertising and none ruining a users experience, they would never just dump adverts in after, so we can assume this is just a basic idea of what they want the site to look like.

Agreed.

I also loved their work on Daily Beast and Vogue. Hard to make some real design statements on content sites.

Done by Code and Theory, the same group that redesigned Engadget: http://www.codeandtheory.com/#/work/featured/Engadget-Redesi...

Given that TC is also an AOL property and the date on the most recent article is June 3rd, that would seem to suggest this is relatively recent.

But god damn is it ugly as sin.

Somebody should grab a screenshot who still has the page open. Looks like they might have taken it down...

Urgo posted it a bit lower http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2650731

Posted a video of it too so you can see the scrolling in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MBZ8P7lm0A

Please tell me this is a very early iteration that wasn't meant for public consumption yet.

And it's down now. Did anybody snag a screenshot?

Ugh. I'm glad I missed it.

Looks pretty awful judging by the screenshots people posted. Other than the mountain of 3rd party crap they use that bogs their site down ridiculously I don't think there's much wrong with the design of TC.

Layout and usability is vanilla and noting too special. I'm guessing this coincides with larger rebranding effort?

I think the only thing that's turning people off is the intensity of the green in the graphics. With full picture content and ads, it looks like a design that's easily tolerable.

I personally think the text over picture isn't suited for a blog platform unless it's restricted to big feature articles. I don't read TC that much - do they even have content like that?

Haha I love it. It feels like I've been transported back into the bbs era. They need to fix the whole text over picture, or lack there of thing though.

That was the only bit I liked - I've seen it somewhere else recently - one of the fashion sites I think - I love it - rest of the page I'm not so sure about - but I wouldn't like to be judged on one of our early mocks.

"They need to fix the whole text over picture, or lack there of thing though."

It's pretty deliberate though. Reminds me of a magazine.

I actually like it. after all it's just a blog - you gotta try really hard to mess up it's UI/UX (and in that case the usability). Gawker I reckon has put a tremendous effort into it. The new look just seems classier with the pixelated logo, althought the one thing they really gotta fix is their page loading time.

I hope they stick with conventional URI syntax and don't go all hashbang-crazy like certain other websites have done.

In principle the purpose of design is to provide a particular product with utility. Judging from the screenshots below, this provides no real more usability or better user experience.

Reminds me of Gawker redesign; can't wait for the fail.

MineCrunch :)

And they took it down.

Usability didn't look great.

But at least they made the page load faster. Techcrunch is horrible because it takes ages to load. They really need to optimize it.

They NEED to get rid of all the little facebook and twitter widgets. I have the widget block plugin on Chrome and TechCrunch is finally fast because I block all those share buttons. About a year ago I think, we techcrunch commenters checked the actual size of the site and the front page was 9 MB !!! We complained and complained and months later it went down to 4 MB. Today it's at 2 MB. How they managed to stuff 7MB of worthless javascript and code and button images, I don't know. But the good news it's MUCH faster than before. Unfortunately, I lost interest and moved on.

My reason was this: What's the point of absorbing all that information everyday from sites when I'm not investing what I know into doing something. If you want to seriously get your startup off the ground, for me at least, the right thing to do was to quit TechCrunch, quit Mashable, quit Reddit, and severely limit HN, and actually start getting something done. I'm a much happier peaceful and productive person without the "latest news and opinions" being beamed into my head every few minutes. Mark Zuckerberg is wrong, information overload is real, information addiction is even worse, and once you are free of it, you don't ever want to go back.

edit: On one hand the widgets do bring in traffic but the sluggishness of the site might cancel that out.

I like how the header changes as you scroll down.

This is ugly, but at least it's not Gizmodo.

If TC actually rolls out this design, I think it will be as frowned upon as Gizmodos terrible redesign.

I like the basic use of space and layout, but the graphics are pretty crap. Bet that'll change though.

Will this be the new design for TC? I hope note because the header section is pretty ugly.

Not just the header section, but individual titles on articles feel really scrunched.

Looks like 8-bit green vomit

Does it really matter? No RSS consumers here?

I'm reading on RSS and only click through it when there is an embedded Youtube video.

Look out behind you! It's a Creeper!

hmm… there's no ads shown. The design will look really different once the ads are placed.

I quite like it.

Broken on ipad.

seems to be down right now.

Good thing TechCrunch isn't worth reading anymore, or I'd actually be upset.

http://thestartupfoundry.com/ is what i replaced my TC feed with.

Will the redesign include a spell check/editor review loop for their story submissions? I doubt it. Until their content is clean - I care not for the graphic designer they hire.