Emmanuel Quartey

Thoughts on the Pinterest redesign

Maybe it’ll grow on me, but I’m not a fan of Pinterest’s new profile page.

BEFORE: Old Pinterest profile page, from Mashable article.

AFTER: New Pinterest profile page, from Mashable article. Note that this shows a pin-view, not the board-view, as in the BEFORE image.

Ego Before Content

The beauty of the old version was that the content - the pinboards - had pride of place. The redesign puts a big fat profile at the very top, which completely distracts from the most important thing on the page - the pins.

Layout

The pinboards used to be better organized. The tight grid (and it’s vertical emphasis) made it a possible to quickly understand what was being presented. The new layout is a mess. It requires you to scroll down before you can really see anything, and the horizontal orientation makes the page feel flabby. Add that the images are cropped in a weird way, and the whole thing seems like disjointed images floating in white void.

Also, what’s up with the serif used for the pinboard title? On a page with everything else in sans-serif, the serif looks very out of place. 

If it ain’t broke…

I would love to learn what motivated the redesign. I imagine that there were strategic considerations that made it desirable (maybe to make room for new features?) but I can’t help but feel that it was unnecessary. The new page is messy, overly complicated, and unattractive.