There’s been a lot of redesign talk lately among big names, most notably Facebook and Yahoo!. Twitter announced today that it was rolling out a new design. This design turns out to be pretty much all about aesthetics rather than improved user experience.
Don’t worry. If you think the design is missing some things that you would like to see added, Twitter is accepting feedback, and had this to say:
This hardest thing about doing a redesign like this deciding what not to tackle. I’m fairly certain that much of the feedback to this will be, “What about…[your favorite feature request / annoyance].” Please be assured the changes we’ve made here aren’t the only things we want to (or will) change. They’re not even, necessarily, the most important. The scope of this project was limited to light-weight front-end work. We have whole other teams working on back-end changes and more fundamental functionality changes (which, as mentioned above, this is also laying the groundwork for).
Search is one such functionality that is absent from the new design, and with Twitter’s recent acquisition of Summize, that will no doubt be something that will be added in the future. “But until then, Twitter users who 
want to search for anyone or anything are left with no options, unless they know enough to type “Summize” into their browser bar,” writes Peter Kafka at Silicon Alley Insider. “That can’t possibly be what the company has in mind, right?” Of course, I would have to add that Twellow is always an option for finding people.
Search Engine Watch notes that FriendFeed has also coincidently (?) launched a redesign, which actually does improve functionality with the addition of friend lists.
Those unhappy with the way Twitter now looks can customize it to an extent an a color basis. The customizer (pictured above) can be found under Settings>Design. For more details about what exactly Twitter altered, read their explanation.
