There are a lot of things to like about the new GQ web design.
- great black, white and gold colour scheme (with yellow highlights)
- a well-ordered grid
- elegant, uncluttered navigation
- chunky footer
- plenty of whitespace and breathing room around the text
GQ.com gets a makeover.
Girls gallery page.
One thing – and leaving aside the xbox ad currently turning the home page background into a sea of green bubbles:
I’d be interested to know the rationale behind not using a similar jQuery carousel on the individual feature pages as implemented on the section pages. A fresh page-load for every image just feels so clunky these days, and there are surely AJAX solutions to allow a more fluid browsing experience whilst maintaining reasonable loading times.
So what’s the reason? Extra pages for serving extra ads? Image bookmarking? Concern about presenting high-quality images without a performance hit, especially on slower connections?
Finally – the typographical double act of Georgia and Arial is undoubtedly a classic combo (used by the Guardian and many, many others). But my guess is that with the gradual evolution of web typography, embracing the potential of the @font-face CSS rule and of Cufón, sites that use this staple set of traditional web-safe fonts will begin to look dated over the next few years.