I disagree; the current site design is decent enough, but falls over in terms of fitting on screens. See my comments and screenshot in http://code.google.com/p/lesswrong/issues/detail?id=240#c4
So I'd like to suggest the graphic redesign make LW a little more visually compact. It doesn't have to be optimized for cellphones or as compact as a random page on http://www.gwern.net , but it'd be nice if it didn't take 2 screens to see one permalinked comment.
I agree that the single comment view has more boilerplate up top, but otherwise I'd say it usually fits on screens without any trouble.
I was curious about your comment so I took a look at the screenshot. You say in the bug report that you're using a "fairly small font" setting but the font is being rendered much larger for you than I see using default IE9 and FF4 settings. Plus your picture shows the page with a serif font while the CSS specifies sans-serif. I'm not sure if it's a browser issue or if you're using custom settings, but in a 1600...
In the next month, the administrators of Less Wrong are going to sit down with a professional designer to tweak the site design. But before they do, now is your chance to make suggestions that will guide their redesign efforts.
How can we improve the Less Wrong user experience? What features aren’t working? What features don’t exist? What would you change about the layout, templates, images, navigation, comment nesting, post/comment editing, side-bars, RSS feeds, color schemes, etc? Do you have specific CSS or HTML changes you'd make to improve load time, SEO, or other valuable metrics?
The rules for this thread are:
BUT DON’T JUMP TO THE COMMENTS JUST YET: Take a few minutes to collect your thoughts and write down your own ideas before reading others’ suggestions. Less contamination = more unique ideas + better feature coverage!
Thanks for your help!