DeviantArt had a lot of cool features created in the last few years. Users, specially beta testers subscribers, have been offered with lots of cool ways to manage their contents and to interact with the site (like poping comment areas, tabbed setting areas, appearing info areas during submission ... (and these are just to mention some of the most basic).
But even though it's internal structure was up to the most recent technologies (AJAX) and everything was made in the most modern ways of building web pages (CSS2), IT LACKED THE GOOD LOOK of the whole page.

But wait!!! These guys are not sleeping at work... Although you might not see new features in a long time that doesn't mean that new things are being done in that exact moment. And of course it's good for designers to leave time for users to get used to current interfaces for some time. Otherwise they never get to fully experiment the design in order to maximize it, to find it's bugs and, better yet, to understand how the target audience interact with was created.

Still... Regular users as myself were not getting much from this interface lately. I believe now I'll once more spend infinite hours exploring not only the new look but the content being delivered by it. And I'm quite sure that this new look means a lot more than just a new way of seeing DevArt. I'm sure that new experiences are lying behind this skin. Because it's not only a skin, you know?? Just notice how simple the navigation has become. Hadn't anyone wondered of why weren't the menus organized like this before? For instance: "Submit Art", "Update Journal", "Manage Prints", "Edit Profile", "Settings", "Upgrade". Isn't it much simpler to have the Submit button allong with the Journal Update and Manage Prints ones? I mean, their both for posting content: probably the most important and most frequent posts everybody does in their pages.
What about the Settings and Profile buttons in a central place (instead of dislocated from the whole content of the page) followed by the daring Update zone!! I give this item much emphasys because I'm sure that not a single admin realizes how much time I've spent in the last couple of years everytime I wanted to re-suscribe my account... In the end, either would I use the page that I was present with telling me that my subscription was comming to an end OR I would have to crawl around till I found something on the bottom of DevArt's main page allowing me to do the transaction. In alternative, I would also find some stamps lying around the devwatch page but in the end it was an hard task. An hard task that should be so.

So in conclusion I must say that these small changes I've come across so far, and other cool new AJAX interactions around as well, might just seem like eyecandy to some of you but I guaranty you that these well measured steps in the way to a simpler and much pleasant web experience around dA. Some graphic changes where also kinda needed in my opinion, like the changes made to the deviation counter ont he main page (the last one was aughfully done, with lot's of highlight onto it when the number was barely fitting in it's space).
Ultimatetly the web is becoming more and more user friendly allowing us to interact in a much more intuitive way with web applications such as this, saving time to what matters most: in this case, creating new pieces of art and inovating with new means of delievering visual experiences around the world. I just wonder... Will there ever be a chance that dA's team will think about changing the site's color...?


P.S. I'm not complaining. Way to go dA!