Welcome to the brand new Brothers-Brick.com!

Those of you visiting The Brothers Brick today will notice some big changes to the site. We’ve just rolled out a brand new design that we hope you’ll like a lot.

Brothers-Brick.com 3.0

Key changes:

  • Optimized for whatever screen size you prefer — desktop browsers, tablets, and mobile devices.
  • Wider post area to highlight bigger photos and videos (with dynamic resizing for smaller screens).
  • Simpler navigation across the top of the page.

Everything you love about TBB is of course all still here, but now the site should load faster and work better no matter how you choose to access it. And it’s just a whole lot prettier.

Huge thanks to Alyse (half of the dynamic Bolt of Blue duo) for the new design!

Love it, hate it, bug reports — let us know what you think in the comments!

14 comments on “Welcome to the brand new Brothers-Brick.com!

  1. Andrew Post author

    Comments are back. Yay! Sorry about that, everyone who was trying to leave feedback on this post. I was wondering what was keeping you all so quiet…

  2. legoscot

    I absolutely love the new interface! I frequently check this site from my iPhone, and it is Sooooo much nicer, that along with a fresh clean look on my iPad. No to sure they could have built it any more user friendly. Thanks!

  3. Xenomurphy

    I like this design as much as I liked the old one. Some subtle changes to optimize everything by keeping as much of the old charme as possible – this is the kind of redisign I really appreciate, not the horrible naffness Marissa Mayer forced upon us over night.

  4. roguefx

    the second social icon at the top looks corrupt, and there’s a tiny “Q” or magnifying glass below the Facebook icon

  5. RohanBeckett

    Very nice… a great refresh to the site!

    just a couple of things…
    I personally think the old font was a bit more readable..
    and any chance of making it ‘flex’ a bit better, for those of us who browse maximised, on large-res monitors?
    ~680 pixels for the main ‘content’ column? surely it can be a *bit* bigger? :-)

  6. Andrew Post author

    Thanks for the feedback so far, everyone!

    @rogefx: Yeah, that’s the Twitter icon and what appears to be a stray search button. You must be on Safari, as I am. Those two little issues don’t happen in any other browser, so we’re working to figure out how to fix them. Thanks for reporting this, Tommy!

    @RohanBeckett: Font is one of the things we’re playing with to make the text more readable on all platforms, yes. But I’m not sure I personally agree with you about the width of the main post column. There’s a limit to how well the human eye reads right to left (or left to right) within horizontal text, and you don’t want to force the reader to scan a line that’s too long. This width is fairly close to ideal, from my experience in content design… :-)

  7. L@go

    I liked the old design, and I like the new one. I actually disagree that this new one is better for the iPhone than the old one was, though, as I normally read it with the phone sideways. Doing that now makes the text annoyingly big. But it’s a very easy fix – as easy as tilting the phone, actually :) and apart from that, the now look is very appealing. Its spacious and airy – words that Flickr apparently has forgotten completely.

    There’s one small glitch, though, that seems a bit strange. I normally keep TBB open in a tab, so I just refresh it (F5) every now and then to check for updates. When I’ve done this now, the YouTube videos you’ve imbedded don’t refresh – which means the post on the top contains the same video as the one underneath it (i.e. the Gollum post and the Thriller post both contain the Thriller video). It’s fixed when I use Ctrl+F5, but there’s something fishy going on there. Oh, and I use Firefox.

  8. alyse

    Rohan – very strange. I’ll try to take a look. I use the latest Chrome on Windows 7 and the site renders perfectly for me. Thanks for all the feedback. Still working on some of the various quirks to improve the overall design.

  9. stevethesquid

    Personally I don’t like it, but then again I hate changes! Too big and white. I’ll probably get used to it.

    I DO wish that it displayed more items on one page, I hate having to keep clicking “older posts” every time I go on vacation for just a few days.

  10. EmergencyBricks

    It’s a step up from the old design, but it’s still lacking to compete in the modern internet. It doesn’t appear to be responsive, that would be my first priority if I was in charge of the design as that is the 1 true way to optimize across platforms.

    The content is organized well and easily accessible so that’s a plus. The header is a bit dull still, could use a more lively header image rather than the tiled studs. The header text should be replaced with a sizable logo representing the site, as it is now “The Brothers Brick” seems like more of a footnote then a statement announcing what website this is.

    Other than that it gets the job done, but just seems like a really basic WordPress mod.

Comments are closed.