It’s disheartening to see a website you’ve grown to love go from good to worst in design (thankfully the content will always be superb.) When they announced the redesign, I was excited. An improved Pitchfork that is easier to use, maybe? My hopes were high, but the unveiled redesign has left me bummed out. The design is even harder to use, it is disjointed, over-usage of pixel fonts, no selection of character encoding, the code is a verifiable nightmare, and the color chosen, while interesting, just doesn’t fit well with the site’s image. Don’t take my word for it though, check it out for yourself.

Designed by Some Odd Pilot their portfolio seem to have sites that look alike in layout principle (see site1 and site2 menu), and there’s no web standards to be seen. Maybe next time Pitchfork Media go with a redesign, they will go with a better web design studio.