Here's a comparison of the pages for individual releases.

The layout of the new page? Wonderful and amazing and good.
The aesthetic? Completely garbage. It's a generic store page.

Notice also: with the old site, there was a different banner at the top of the screen, depending on which series the release came from. In the new version?

It's just nothing. A completely white void.

(An aside: that big red bar isn't usually there in the old site, it's temporary)

here's a mockup that I just made. Why don't they do this?

It's still exactly the same, but it looks much less bland and soul-less.

They show this image for how it looks on a mobile site, which is fine. I *like* that the mobile site is simple.

But why not make the white centre (which you can see already has a pre-defined maximum width) be surrounded with the old grey? Add extra visual contrast where you can. Make the actual release area stand out.

ok, so they've launched the new site. There are still teething problems (stuff taking a while to load, links that don't quite work, etc), so I'll save most of my judgements for a week.

But I want to say a few things:

• Actually using the site feels mostly fine. Many things are much more usable than before.
• It looks like they've made an unnannounced change: renaming the "Main Range" to "The Monthly Adventures". I like the new name, but I wish they had said beforehand.

Also: I'm glad that they seperated out the classic series dramas and the new series dramas, that will actually help people a lot.

@lizardsquid This stuff drives me nuts, too. It's like someone wrote somewhere "everything must be all-white" and people took it like gospel. I like contrast. And not having my screen blare out bright light from every inch. ;_;