Take a look around. This is the new Gizmodo.
If you're not ready to transition to the new design, you can click here to use the old blog view.
What's Changed the Most?
You'll see that we have one giant story on the left here when you visit Gizmodo. This makes it easy for us to point out what we think is the hottest story right now, while still allowing news to keep flowing on the right side of the page. This gives us the ability to feature a single major story of the moment, as a newspaper front page might, without losing the flow of the traditional blog. And the new page is lighter than the old and should load a lot faster.
How to use the new design
It's simple: You can scroll through posts one by one with the up and down arrow keys, or the j + k keys.
Those buttons on the top right are there for orienting yourself while navigating. The home button takes you back to the "current" homepage, same as if you reloaded gizmodo.com. The fire (hot) button sorts stories to the most currently read stories, so you can see what's most popular now. Search is search. The latest button brings you back to the latest posts.
When you're inside a post, you can click on photos enlarge them to their native size.
And those of you who use our forums, such as whitenoise, will notice a change in URL. (You'll have to bookmark gizmodo.com/whitenoise/forum instead of just gizmodo.com/whitenoise.) There will likely be some bugs and random wonkiness with the forums, but they should be fixed soon.
Keep in mind this new design isn't completely finished. We'll still be fixing bugs and making tweaks to make it even better over the coming weeks, adding small things here and there to make browsing easier. But if you're not ready to transition to the new design, you can click here and use the blog view. And if you have questions, comments and bug reports, this redesign forum is the place to discuss. Also, if you have screenshots and specific issues, you can email us as well.
If you're looking for a deeper explanation of the design philosophies behind the new Gizmodo, read this post. But in a nutshell, a big reason is that...
The new layout looks good
If you don't believe us, see for yourself.
This HDR video makes an old Chapel look like a video game—more than real.
The most hardcore metal LEGO video. Two tastes that taste great together. (p.s. Don't eat LEGO.)
Did you miss that lunar eclipse back in December? You won't be able to see one like it for another 372 years. Unless we invent such things as "video recorders". Click it and watch.
What does an artist do with 2,200 pounds of salt? Salt maze, of course!
Why are we still using down to build jackets? Because it works wonderfully.
It allows us to do new things
The old design was limited in the fact that every new post pushed all the older posts down. So if we had a big story, or a bunch of other interesting stories that we want to draw your attention to, we'd need to hold smaller news items until afterwards. Not a good solution. Now, we can use the tag [BLIP] (as you see on the right side —>) to denote that we have short, poppy news items that don't need further investigation or digging into. And thanks to the new design, we can do a lot more of these, which saves our time (and yours), so we can focus on more important stories. Think of it as expanding and covering more news than we would have before, while at the same time being able to focus on the bigger stories as well.
This Is Gizmodo
And if you're just joining us...
And as always, if you have any suggestions or spot any bugs with the new layout, let us know at either help@gawker.com, for problems, or feedback@gawker.com, for suggestions/comments on the layout.