New Store design in production

What lies beneath the visuals? :: June 7th, 2006 :: Steam updates :: 16 Responses

The new (and incomplete) design does not yet provide any real insight into its purpose.

We might not be seeing a second Store, but the current one is undergoing an upgrade (thanks Master). Click past the front page of version 3 to see its new design, an incomplete but already stylish grey-tone page with more prominent metadata, a more efficient design, and greatly improved semantics.

Aside from minor new metadata fields and the clear visual upgrade (which moves away from the white background traditional in online stores), the new design does not yet provide clues to any deeper purpose, save perhaps that it may be part of a redesign of the main site, nor hint at Valve’s answer to the management issues posed by the rapidly approaching torrent of back-catalogue Atari titles.

The V3 directory is no longer accessible.

16 Responses to this post:

Comments

June 7th, 2006 at 1:25 pm ::
Tom Edwards Says:

Left-aligned images make their triumphant return!

I’ve got to admit, I am a complete sucker for orange on black. The only Windows theme I’ve ever been truly happy with is Black Mesa, so the new V3 design is just wonderful as far as I’m concerned. If the colour scheme remains as it is now, I’m going to end up browsing the store just to hover my pointer over the purchase buttons!
June 7th, 2006 at 2:11 pm ::
ATimson Says:

Well, at least part of the purpose of the design seems fairly obvious—to bring the Store into visual alignment with the default Steam theme. It looks to me like the rest is just general cleanup, advancing the page design past 1999.

(It’d be nice if the Store could be skinned, somehow, like the client can be; but seeing as how they don’t even off that for the much simpler Update News page, I’m not holding my hopes up.)
June 7th, 2006 at 2:37 pm ::
Tom Edwards Says:

I’ve whipped up a new stylesheet based on the V3 Store. Any opinions? It only applies to comments right now, so excuse the contrast with the rest of the page.
June 7th, 2006 at 2:58 pm ::
Andy Simpson Says:

I’m wondering about the HD resolution part. The only reason I can see to include that would be for the Xbox 360, it’s fairly meaningless on the PC. Make of that what you will.
June 7th, 2006 at 2:59 pm ::
ATimson Says:

Mostly, I like it; I think that you could probably go with just the one background color, though, since there’s the gap between each box to serve as a visual separator.

(Minor bug: since the text is white on the grey background, the comment # is also white, and thus disappears.)
June 7th, 2006 at 3:13 pm ::
Tom Edwards Says:

Andy Simpson said:

I’m wondering about the HD resolution part. The only reason I can see to include that would be for the Xbox 360, it’s fairly meaningless on the PC. Make of that what you will.

I reckon that field is for intended for videos.

(Minor bug: since the text is white on the grey background, the comment # is also white, and thus disappears.)

Aha, I was wondering about that.

The dark background is for the post author’s comments BTW: look at some longer comment threads to get a better idea of how it will work out.
June 7th, 2006 at 3:25 pm ::
ATimson Says:

Or even this thread now; I see what’s happening. And like it. 🙂

(By the way, I’ve finally tracked down why we can’t edit comments; it’s because WordPress doesn’t support users editing their comments. Comments on a post can only be edited by someone who has the capability to edit the post in question.)
June 7th, 2006 at 3:29 pm ::
Tom Edwards Says:

Yep, and any plug-ins to change that involve widespread hacking of core WP files. Not good.

I’ve tried hiding the comment numbers. I’m trying to work out if it’s possible to have them displayed inside the LIs without an ugly line break because of the H5, but removing them entirely seems to work quite well too.
June 7th, 2006 at 4:54 pm ::
ATimson Says:

Well, hacking the core WP files is only not good if you don’t know how to use diff. 😉
June 7th, 2006 at 6:13 pm ::
mAster Says:

rofl wonder why they took it down, maybe i shouldn’t have told you about it…
June 7th, 2006 at 9:12 pm ::
DiSTuRbEd Says:

They are very quiet about new things, thats why. 😉
June 7th, 2006 at 11:44 pm ::
hahnchen Says:

I see they’ve got a some ESRB like warnings onto the games now. As much as I despise the American way (No sex please, Violence is fine) of censorship, it’ll probably mean parents can make a more assured choice to what is and isn’t bought over steam for their kids.

Although I do think that the new design is too cluttered and slightly unbalanced.
June 8th, 2006 at 12:56 am ::
wizpig64 Says:

I like the new skin, but every one of the admin’s posts being highlighted black is really distracting. (Maybe a different color?) This is especially true when they interfere with the alternating white/light grey color scheme of everyone else’s comments (or maybe it’s just that every other post is made by you in this thread). I dig our gravatars moving up into the title though.

BTW: look at some longer comment threads to get a better idea of how it will work out.

The link you gave only works for this one set of comments. 🙁

Oh yea, almost forgot: Thanks for my new desktop skin! ^_^
June 9th, 2006 at 3:48 am ::
wizpig64 Says:

This just in: Darwinia is roumored to be making its way to Xbox Live Arcade. I think it would be great on the Wii Virtual Console, especially with the gesture funcionality with the Wii controller.
June 18th, 2006 at 6:35 pm ::
DiSTuRbEd Says:

You know with them working on this new Store, along with getting ready for vb3 on the SP Forums, I wonder if the site will be getting an overhaul aswell?

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