A New Look for Facebook

Thank you windows 8 for "inspiring" a whole generation of designers to rip you off.

In all seriousness, I've seen this same style concept for more then a few redesigns as of late. I fear for the design industry sometimes. I guess it's better then rounded corners, reflections and drop shadows though.

When a huge percentage of your supposed new design is covered with stock photos of pretty people, it makes it extremely hard to judge objectively. On the other hand, that is a great sales tactic.

I always felt it is kind of wrong for designers to use stock photos that represent best-case uses instead of typical-case photos. Best case photos show models smiling. The typical-case pictures are poorly taken photos or random gifs or someone not very photogenenic.

For years, before Behance redesigned their layout (which I think was sometime last year), the way that it sorted projects when you stumbled across the site was by popularity, so the popular ones just kept getting more popular. A project called the "Facebook Facelift" from 2009 (http://www.behance.net/gallery/Facebook-Facelift/314489) was (is?) the most popular project on the site, and is equally thorough with a video to boot. I'm going to take a guess that the designer here was looking to piggyback on the success that project had, rather than create an honestly useable/consistent design (not that this is a justification of how poor some of the concepts are, but rather a reason why someone would spend so much time working on something as tedious as this despite the UX issues it creates).

They should really use more photos taken with crappy cameras in less than optimal conditions so it looks more realistic.

I won't speak for anyone else, but better friends would certainly improve my Facebook experience. Unfortunately, I would be unlikely to improve theirs similarly.