The DOAJ site has had a design makeover. On the front page they’ve gone for a 1964 home-decor ‘modernist abstraction wallpaper’ look, which will likely have nostalgic connotations for Baby Boomer librarians, and perhaps a few who recall the early arcade videogame Pac-man, but will mean nothing to most students.
The initial ‘modernism at home’ buzz does not then sit well with the styling of the numbers or of the “Find open access journals & articles” strapline on the front page. Either the fonts are all sleekly retro-modernist or they’re not. Don’t mix the two, I’d suggest.
The main Search box button is a very unfortunate shade of yellow, made even more jarring in combination with the blue flash on the dropdown menu…
Having made a search, the search button becomes a soft orange which better matches the new logo. But this still has the jarring blue flash on the dropdown menu.
Text-selection colour leaves the selected text clear (my Web browser has a UserScript that keeps the text-selection colour the same across all sites, but I turned it off to test).
Search results are looking good, but on a widescreen desktop I have to scroll down to get them.
What I get…
What I want (and have to scroll down to every time)…
Overall, pretty good. But the front page still needs some tweaking.
