Do you think having giant images as the focal point of a website should be the new standard in website layout? Instead of focusing on the design of the site, everything is completely simplistic with a giant image that fills your screen with an article and comments under it. While its not uncommon for images or a video to proceed an article, these giant images seem a bit distracting to me. If this is the new trend of website design, I'm not really feeling it..
http://kotaku.com/recommended
I do like the image annotations, but the overall look seems so basic and there is so much more scrolling now. At least when you click on latest posts it has smaller images to see an overall list of articles:
http://kotaku.com/latest
On my laptop, my resolution is 720p. Maybe this isn't as bad on a larger resolution? I've found myself holding the CTRL button and mouse scrolling down to get a smaller look.
Facebook's new News feed has larger images too now, but not nearly as big as the Gawker sites.