DZone's Different!

Hello DZoners!

My name is Austin Kowitz and I’m a graphic designer at DZone. And you can mostly blame (praise?) me and DZone developer, Ross Jernigan, for what you see currently at DZone. We still have tons of ideas we haven't implemented yet -- but we're doing the agile thing, releasing early, releasing often. So we'd love hear your feedback, whatever it may be. I’m bracing myself for the whirlwind of..criticism? excitement? We await your response with bated breath. :]

So let’s go over some of the changes and the reasons we made them.

First, in general, we wanted to make the site much more legible and feel less cluttered. So we increased text size for important elements, while giving every element a bit more elbow room.

You’ll especially notice the larger article headlines on the Zone homepages. The goal here?  Letting you scan the whole Zone feed more quickly, making it easier to find stories particularly interesting to you.

Also on the Zone homepages, check out our new thumbnails! Now every article will boast a visually interesting counterpart -- which I'm definitely excited about. But we're hoping the thumbnails will also help you all find cool content.

The new masthead at the top of the site is definitely a significant change. This brings the best stories from all the Zones to the top of every page. The masthead is expertly curated by our excellent editorial team — guaranteed awesome, fresh every day.

The trending topics bar, just below the masthead, gives you a quick feel for the pulse of software development today. Please do send us any and all feedback on the masthead in particular — we’d love to make it as useful as possible.

So yeah, please let us know what you think. We're really excited about the redesign, and look forward to hearing your feedback. Enjoy the new look, and help us make DZone better for you!

Thanks!

- The Dzone Team