There is nothing special about that design. I’m not going to bother reading all the other posts praising/criticizing it, because I don’t really care about surveying such a subjective subject. Only my opinion counts. :)

I initially viewed it in FF with all my normal adblocking and was underwhelmed. Turned adblocking off and was underwhelmed.

Honestly, why is this even being discussed?

If everyone else knows better… then prove it and help out the rest of us poor souls with bad designs and no money to pay to override a competent designer…

http://marlincreek.com/content/view/66/35/

Wow, why do people hate green??

It’s funny, I’d never heard of TechCrunch before now. :-)

http://www.cameronmoll.com/archives/000938.html

Ultimately, the team lost the task, quite considerably, and was sent to the boardroom.

When quizzed about the loss, the project manager was asked why they didn’t listen to their team member while the team member was asked whether or not they fought hard enough for their position on things. The project manager was adamant that they were right while the team member said that they had voiced their concerns but it was not their responsibility to go AWOL and not participate in what the project manager wanted them to do.

Who got fired in the end? The person who didn’t listen to the advice that was given to them or the person who disagreed in the direction the project manager was taking the team?

Reading some of the comments on the web I am assuming that a lot of these designers who are riveting Rachel to the wall have no concept of ‘giving the customer what they want’. Many times, in all forms of business, trying to convince a customer that they should do/buy something when they have their own agenda set in their mind can be excrutiating. But at the end of the day, as a paying customer, it is their sole discretion. No amount of advice can sway them sometimes. And this is something that I think is being completely overlooked.

In that instance, I would imagine working with some of the designers who are commenting to be a complete nightmare if, despite how wonderful their design may be, they do not respect the wishes of their client. Perhaps in their business, one of their motto’s is that the customer is never right?

From what I understand reading from the comments, there are a lot of clients that Rachel has impressed and even the fact that TC have employed her to do the job says something about the way she designs and the way she conducts her business.

I’m going to disagree on this one. As a designer, aka, one who is hired to make things usable and look good, if the client requests a site design that is so incredibly ugly looking that 85% of the people who comment about it think it’s awful, then that designer has NOT done their job. What’s the point of hiring a designer to redesign a site if everybody says the previous version not only looked better, but functioned better as well? If you’ll read deeper into the comments about the design, people are saying the green is too bright (aka, tough to read), the content isn’t the focus (aka, the design doesn’t lead the eye anywhere), and that ads are the primary focus (again, the design isn’t focused on the content.)

Rachel probably knew that pushing live a redesign that looked like that would get chewed up by his audience, but it happened anyway. As a designer myself, the reason clients hire me is to make sure that a situation like this *doesn’t happen*, and that, at the very least, people see the new design as a big improvement. This definitely did not happen here. Michael could be happy with the design, but overall the project is a failure based on how many people dislike the new look and now distain Michael for making ads the center-focus of his site. Steps could have been taken to better integrate the ads into the site layout, but they weren’t, and although Michael might like it better this way I don’t feel as though a designer should sit back and just “let it happen”, especially when a high-profile redesign such as TechCrunch could dramatically affect her career, either positively or negatively.

Darren, my biggest issue is this sentence on the Crunch Notes post you wrote

Linked to, not wrote

And if you’re wondering about the green theme, there’s a reason for it (hint – it keeps me focused on my goals)

That’s really all I need to know