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    I'll try to keep my response short. Inconsistent? Colors, shadows, etc. What have we touched? Buttons, border radius. Older version of the site? This vision was started from the current state. Push an item visually? Top bar navigation—it would never ship this way. It has some usability concerns and business constraints that need to be addressed. Frustrating? Crowding of the site. Spacing/number of borders used is very overwhelming and can add to the intimidation. Commented Aug 8, 2023 at 17:03
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    @Piper Thanks, that's helpful, although I still don't really see the inconsistency in colors or shadows, for example. Different colors seems like a good thing for identifying separate information/functionality, so what is it you mean when you say they are inconsistent? Are things like the capitalization change in the text links below Q&A intentional? I thought those were just recently capitalized for design reasons in a previous iteration. Commented Aug 8, 2023 at 17:11
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    @BryanKrause: I don't think Piper's intent there is to suggest we'll make everything use the same color, for instance – but rather, to reassure folks that specific elements looking a certain way in the overall "design vision" mockup doesn't necessarily mean it's an intentional change or final decision on what we're going to do. I suspect the lowercase used in the buttons/links below the post body is one of those inconsistencies (since they are intentionally capitalized right now, per Stacks guidelines – whereas they used to be lowercase). Commented Aug 8, 2023 at 17:38
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    @V2Blast No of course not, sorry I didn't mean to imply that either, just to emphasize my own very rudimentary understanding of color in design and that I need something more like "this orange and that orange are from a different family" or something; "we changed colors here but these ones are still the old". For capitalization, that inconsistency doesn't make sense to me if the design is based on the current site: it would mean someone took the current site, and changed it to make it inconsistent. If they did that, what was the reason? Commented Aug 8, 2023 at 17:47
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    @Piper The recent change to the upvote/downvote buttons was a classic example of pointless change for the sake of change that degraded usability. Another example was the short-lived, horrendously ugly change to watched tags. Skepticism about your "vision" stems directly from SO's history of things like that. Commented Aug 10, 2023 at 16:39
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    @Piper another puzzling change is the introduction of hyphenation in question titles. I could see that it would be useful to reduce the number of lines a title requires, but 90% of the time it doesn't do that. If one line says "why is this algorithm run-" and the next says "ning slowly?" you have decreased readability compared to "why is this algorithm" ... "running slowly?" The only reason I can see for this is the common problem of engineers providing "solutions" to problems that do not exist simply because they can, thereby in fact creating problems that hadn't existed before. Commented Aug 15, 2023 at 13:24
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    @phoog it's unclear whether that change is actually intentional. We had a similar situation where words were getting more aggressively hyphenated than was reasonable and a dev checked it out and I think it turned out that we have two different hyphenation systems and they'd used the more aggressive one. Is there a bug report mentioning the change? I can imagine the aggressive one being specifically intended for titles on narrow viewports like phones but is being used for all views accidentally. Commented Aug 15, 2023 at 22:47
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    I can't spot a single use of a "shadow" (filter drop-shadow or box-shadow) in either of the screenshots. Am I confused as to what a shadow is? Commented Aug 17, 2023 at 10:29