what the fuck is this shit
Were the exact words that my brain said when I looked at the new Creative Loafing Atlanta website.
I thought maybe the site had been hacked or something, and whatever Russian or Chinese hacking organization was deliberately using a 4-bit retro Oregon Trail looking interface as their ransom page demanding some Bitcoins in exchange for control over their website again, but after a few minutes, not seconds, of figuring out how the new navigation worked, it was pretty much confirmed that this was in fact, the new Creative Loafing Atlanta.
To cut to the chase, this is basically the worst redesign that I’ve ever seen in my entire life. It’s worse than when Pepsi tried to use the Golden Ratio and the Vitruvian Man to explain their logo, which was pretty bad considering it literally cost Pepsi $1.4 million dollars for a PowerPoint so inflated with bullshit that it could have incinerated Palo Alto if it caught on fire. But that’s just a logo, on a line of products that lots of people otherwise enjoy to indulge in regardless of what logo was slapped onto the bottles.
Creative Loafing Atlanta was already a publication in more or less rag status, and they’re an entity that can’t really afford to fuck up on design when whether people admit it or not, love to judge books by their covers. And yet, here we stand, with a website that looks like an unintentional glitch, or your monitor fell face first and when you propped it back up, pixels are dead and busted, resulting in the horrific interface that currently loads.
Aside from looking like garbage, the site’s functionality has somehow managed to become more abstract and requiring more trial and error to figure out just how the fuck the site actually works anymore. But to know that this was done deliberately, makes me wonder just how many people need to have their heads examined for green lighting this putrid example of miserable design.
Seriously, I’ve seen Geocities/Tokyo/Dojo/6785’s that have had better design than this shit, and that’s even with the requisite animated gif of a stick figure with a pickaxe on a sign explaining that the site was still under construction. At least the 13-17 year olds of back yonder had some degree of understanding functionality, even if the design itself wasn’t up to snuff. CL ATL’s current site lacks either, leading to a site that doesn’t even look as good as a WIX site.
A WIX SITE.
And at least WIX has managed to correct their dynamic proportions problem, AKA functionality that doesn’t require specific size dimensions in order to look right. CL ATL’s site apparently does not have that luxury, and for people like me who have fairly minimally sized browser windows because my screen is 5120×2880, and I don’t want the entire planet to see when I’m surfing on my downtime, when I went to their site, it turns out that a third of the site is inaccessible without having to scroll. Even better functionality than it is designed!
Naturally, since this is still pretty steaming, I’m able to find a “story” where the “leadership” of CL ATL goes out of their way to thank the “designers” of the “rebranding” and to no surprise, it’s some no-name agency that I’ve never heard of; and to go all Inception, out of morbid curiosity, I perused their site, just to make sure that I didn’t know anybody who worked there prior to decide to slam them in writing, which is a relief to know that I don’t have any acquaintances in the small design community of Atlanta who works for such a bullshit chop shop.
But seriously, most agencies operate in peddling bullshit and rhetoric at somewhere around a 60-40 ratio in my opinion, but the guys that did CL ATL’s “rebranding?” All of their work looks like the same hippie-dippie retro bullshit aesthetic, and they have absolutely zero variation in their style. The fact that they have an entire page dedicated to naming and displaying their entire fucking roster of employees kind of tells me that at the core, they’re all still in it for their personal selves, and not necessarily a team-oriented operation, focused on the work and final product, instead of making sure they look nice for their god damn yearbook photos.
The point of all this is that Creative Loafing Atlanta’s rebranding is the most tragic and worst example of a rebrand that I’ve ever seen in my entire life. It’s so bad it actually makes me upset. It’s so bad, it makes me question my occupation and my choice of career, and ponder switching what I do for a living if this is what constitutes acceptable design. It’s so bad, I really needed to know what other people thought of it, so I actually queried people on theFacebook to see what they thought about it too (so far, a very similar sentiment).
I only visited the site as much as I did, because every once in a blue moon, they’ll be some sort of event or restaurant tip that might actually be worth it, and I’m not above trying all outlets, including CL ATL, in order to find good shit. But with such a hideous site that functions as terribly as it looks, I may have to cut CL ATL out of the usual rounds, and hope that I don’t miss anything worthwhile afterwards.
But if history is any indication, I think it’s safe to assume that I probably won’t. Au revoir, shittily-rebranded Creative Loafing Atlanta. And if I’m ever in a position to hire ever again and I see any applicant with this particular agency’s name on their resume, I’ll immediately know the chasm-like low quality of their abilities, and have to earnestly decline them but wish them well on their future endeavors.
