Ow. It burns. With all due respect, I am unthrilled with the new design. The last one wasn't great (hard to distinguish ads from content, for one thing). But this one looks like someone's amateur blog. Courier font + dodgy graphics = eyesore, in my opinion. Plus, the faux tech newspaper motif is soooo Hotwired circa 1998.

You guys can do better!

Best of luck with the other changes. I guess I'll have to satisfy my gossip jones from Perez Hilton from now on.

Nick,

Come on. Valleywag can spill the beans on every other "change in employment," but you try to pass this crap off when Nick Douglas leaves? What gives. You say, "letting him go" which typically means fired. You can do better than that.

http://thomashawk.com/2006/11/nick-douglas-leaving-valleyw...

Would be nice to have more details here.

Best Wishes Nick Douglas!!!

Funny, the design was one of the few in the Gawker empire that I liked. Now I'm not sure which of your generic, overlapping sites I'm on. I guess I'll just have to deal.

Valleywag was starting to feel like "the worst party calendaring service, ever" so I'm hoping you can bring the content up to offset the bland design.

new site hurts my eyes. and sucks. a lot. and you're shooting yourself in the foot by letting go of nick. he nailed the south park snark.

How many photoshop filters had to throw up before you got that logo treatment? It may be the single most ugly thing I have ever seen in my life, and I just saw the "Naked Jen" flickr set from Dave Winer.

A little less conversation, a little more action please

All this aggravation ain't satisfactioning me

Nick, is V-wag set to become the next bloggingstocks.com?

Valleywag is all growed up! All on the B-school tip!

Agreed, Fugly new logo.

I would apply for the job, but the thing I really wanted to cover is sex :(

And emoticons.

The logo is what we might call garish if an assortment of profanities were not at hand.

So who pushed you to fire Nick Douglas? Was it Yahoo? Google?

too bad. nick rocked. you'll have a tough time finding someone half as good to replace him.

Oh, and IBM just called from 1955, they want their Courier font back.

The new site design sucks balls. As for Nick leaving, it COULD be a breath of fresh air (I grew tired of reading The Michael Arrington and Jason Calcanis Show), but you're already on thin ice due to the less than forthcoming nature of the announcement.

Back to Kotaku...

Please make your markup bullet-proof...sorry about the unclosed ital markup above...Valleywag 2.1?

I'm leaving a comment to close the <i> that's messing the page up. Here it is .

Weak layout, this is painful to look at. Not going after personal coverag of civilians"??? Who in this valley could be considered a civilian? Where do you draw the line? Personally, I want you to report on everything in the valley, even including "civilian" execs that use the carpool lane during rush hour because that meeting they are late for is worth the $250 ticket.

Very dissapointed, Nick will be missed.

"Nick Douglas, the kid we plucked from college to launch Valleywag, will be a great journalist."

/will/ ???

That is one of the snarkiest things I've ever read on Valleywag--which is saying a lot.

"more money, a little less sex: that is Valleywag's new gossip mantra" The old model included "hypocrisy" too. Which clearly you have in spades.

Closing italtics. You guys are right -- we do need a fix for that.

More about the move at Marketwatch. And I'm sure Nick Douglas will have his say eventually, if he wants.

well, it was a nice ride. ass design + letting go of your most valuable asset + renewed focus on crap people care even less about = removal from my daily web surfing routine. best of luck to both of you Nicks!

that really is pathetic, i'd consider your part time gig if you a) cover my liability with an extensive insurance policy for possibility run afoul with my own inside knowledge, b) don't pretend to own my contacts and c) let me do it just once or twice a week, but only the good stuff (as in, i know which top elgoog dude is on his way out, and you don't), and c2), must be able to fucking swear, what the shit, right?

I think this post needs more context. Who is this Nick Denton person and why should we care?

my take on this here:
http://500hats.typepad.com/500blogs/2006/11/nick_douglas_w...

(click on link to vote for where nick ends up next)

I ditto the comment on Courier. At first I though "Oh old skool computer fonty COOL" but then I realized it was hurting my eyes ... and my soul. If you're going to go down that road, why not go all the way and use a VT100 font?

Agree - site is ugly and painful to the eyes. Nick Douglas is a rock-star and you are stupid to let him go.

I'm quite disappointed. :-(

It was fun while it lasted. So long, Douglas.

The new site hurts my eyes, my precious precious eyes. I'll wait for 3.0 to come back.

seriously - strange for a site that devotes a good amount of time to covering emerging "web 2.0/2.2/3.0/18.5" trends to take GIANT design step backward.

This design needs more cowbell.

Before Spiers stopped talking to me, she once offered advice about the prospect of working for Denton or Calacanis: (I'm paraphrasing here) "It's the old lesser of two evils thing, but at least with Jason you're gonna get someone who is completely honest and won't stab you in the back."

("Paraphrasing" might not be the word, I very well could have imagined the conversation, but it's still an accurate assessment.)

Of course, backstabbing is in the eye of the person face-down. It's often just accupuncture performed by a good friend who knows your needle points. (Works best when you loosen up first.) Nick Douglas was picked and pricked by Denton, but he's learned much at a young age. This will not be his only fickle boss to pull the rug from under him without warning.

This design hurts my eyes. ROLLBACK.

Wow, it is hard to imagine an uglier design. And the font? You have got to be kidding!

I hope you maintain the same provocative edge and irreverence that has distinguished ValleyWag. I thought Nick was great and will miss his unique perspective on things.

Don Dodge

Hey, sorry not to weigh in earlier. Busy blogging. Who knew it was so much work? Anyway, thanks for the suggestions, and I'll try to answer questions and criticisms this evening.

I agree with everyone who said that the new design sucks.

Although I guess not making the blog readable might be a simple workaround for not having compelling content....

Well, Krucoff, that's about as accurate as everything else you're written about me--which is to say that it's not. That said, I'll give you credit for posting it under your own name this time instead of hiding behind the "EustaceRides" pseudonym.

Now back to not talking to you, which is much more pleasant.

You can also tell us that the old design was just fine, and why did we screw up something so perfect. But, let's be honest here, we're not going back.

How freaking lame is this. First you fire Douglas whose writing was great, then you make the site look absolutely terrible, then you basically say FU to your readers by letting us know that we can complain about how terrible things are but it won't do any good. Say goodbye to my RSS sub for Valleywag, it was good while it lasted at least. For a site that depends so much on tips from your readers, it' isn't a good idea to treat them like crap.

Krucofff and and Spiers are spatting on Valleywag? This doesn't make any sense. Go back to New York!

I tried. I really tried. Kept at it throughout the morning. But I just couldn't come up with a worse design than you did. Unparalleled suckage across all aspects of the interface...that couldn't have been easy. And don't get me started on the editorial change.

hey congrats to the 9th grader who just got dreamweaver installed and built the new design for your site! next time, try google pagebuilder. it'll look better.

usability, anyone?

farewell, nick. we'll miss your insights.

Is the red line across the top Valleywag flat-lining?

We need Nick Douglas, stat!

I know you're set on the design, which is fine but the font is painful to read. I can't go more than a sentence before I notice how hard it is to go on.

I'm on a mac running firefox on a 24" monitor and aside from sites set in comic sans, this is the first blog I've encountered that I can't physically read.

Rave reviews for Courier! Geez, have some respect for a font I loved on my PCJr.

Okay, we'll try something else for body font tomorrow. Stay tuned.

1. Congrats to little Nicky on the Podshow deal.

2. This design is horrible... the logo looks like a B-movie VHS tape cover, and the font is painful.

3. Have fun blogging Nick, but remember who owns NickDenton.net. :-)

Fun fact: Nick has done more posts on Valleywag today than he has on NickDenton.org this year.

Spiers vs. Krucoff, Calacanis vs. Denton, Haughey vs. Courier. What a day! Hey Lock, wanna start a fight?

HIDEOUS.

Courier hurts...

And what's with the massive amounts of white space? Get more advertising dollars. Support Katrina relief or something. Otherwise it makes the site look cheap.

Fimoculous has sucked ass since Sorgaz left Minneapolis.

I don't even have a comeback for that. The Sploid design sucked!

It's as if the entire Kai's Power-Tools collection from 1999 threw up on the logo.

Will future articles be equally lacking in professional refinement?

Will Valleywag be the next site on the Silicon Valley Trash Heap?

Irony is not funny.

I don't know about the design- I'm hoping it will grow on me over time. Glad to hear you guys are reconsidering the Courier, this definitely has to go.

I'll miss reading Nick's posts. He's like the cubedweller next door who says and does the kind of stuff you'd love to say yourself, but don't for fear you'd get fired.

Well, I guess maybe he did get fired.

Oh well!

This looks remarkably better on Mac/Safari than it does on PC/Firefox.

Another one bites the dust, eh Denton?

OH AND REX I'LL CUT YOU FOR TRASHING SPLOID.

(Heh. Context.)

Also, let me join the parade trying to close italics.

Valleywag will never be the same w/ Nick Douglas. ;-(

Someone tell little Nicky that I have a job for him running NickDenton.net: all Denton all the time.

Jason, calling me "little Nicky" is an AWESOME way to make me consider a professional relationship with you.

Worst logo I've seen in quite awhile, congratulations. And since Nick was the one reason I came to the site..what could the next reason be? I'll have to get back to you.

And what's with this?
"However, I suspect we're going to tone down the personal coverage of civilians, because they haven't done anything to seek out attention, and their personal lives aren't that interesting."

Well, that is totally ridiculous. Tell me how many hits you get in general per day, and then how many you got with the Larry n' Lucy photo display. A bit of a spike?

Oh, NOW i remember what the new logo looks like.

"e.r."

Try again, and get Nick back STAT.

I'm still having problems reading this piece of shit site no matter what I try. Mac/Firefox, PC/Opera, VT100/Lynx, OpenMind/NoBias. It still looks like a braille tablet covered in mouse turds. I even printed out pages to see if that would help. No luck. I think my next move is Arabic translation.

I'd like to point out that while all this hubbub is going on, The Blog 50 has quietly relaunched. There's gotta be a place for people to fill the quota on snarky jokes about tech people, and we aim to meet that quota. The Top 50 Bloggers of 2007 list will published around Christmastime, so bookmark, subscribe and stay tuned!

And by the way, since I know he's reading this comments, Nick -- I've told you before in private, but you always have an open invite to edit The Blog 50.

Count me in the corner of people who enjoy the courier font, but hate the fact that Nick Douglas is no longer writing here.