Salon's turning ten next month -- which seems crazy, by the way -- and they've kicked off the celebrations by getting a sleek new look. It's their first redesign since mid-2000 and as media websites get sleeker, more efficient and easier to navigate with even more content, it's been overdue for a while. It looks great -- very professional, attracive color combos, way more user-friendly interface. You still have to watch an ad every day if you're not a Salon Premium member, but that, my friend, is the price of good content.

I will say one thing, pointed out to me by a colleague who knows about such things: the choice of blue for the hyperlinks looks great,
true...but only to those who can see it. However, to the color-blind, blue and green links appear as a slightly bolded version of gray. Check out the illustration on the right, taken from this Salon article on new "Big Ideas" in design. The blue links show up great to those of us who are happily not so afflicted, but in the illustration below, the applicable color pixels (or whatever the tech term for it is) has been stripped out of the illo, leaving a less-remarkable looking block of text.

This may be a small thing (well, to women -- men are far more likely to be color blind, which explains a lot), but it's enough of an issue that web designers take it into account and there are even websites that allow you to check how your site appears to the color-blind (if you want to see how your website measures up, run it through this color-blindness-checking website! See Fishbowl through the eyes of a deuteranope here. The SNL graphic a few down gives the best sense. UPDATE: Yes, we know, our links don't exactly jump out atcha, either. You got us!).

If you want to learn more about color blindness, go here -- it's got lots of information and handy visuals. It must be smart, because it contains sentences like "There are no S-cone anomalous trichromats, so tritans are always dichromats."

Despite this color-blindness thing, my tecchie-web-geek source wanted me to say that King Kaufman RULES and his sports coverage is AWESOME.

p.s. It seems a little odd to be categorizing Salon under "New Media" when they're celebrating their ten-year anniversary, no? How far we have come.