Haystack is a new project by 37Signals (in case you didn’t know). First off this is a great name/brand. “Needle in a haystack” is seriously clever. The design is really minimal and keeps the focus on the design samples, like it should. The sign up or posting your company process is really simplified and feels really fast as you go through it.
I’m quite torn on whether I like the infinite scrolling. It violates common convention, using the scroll bar to determine the length of the content on the page, not having a sense for how many companies are listed, and I really don’t like that, but at the same time I can get into just looking at design after design as they roll down the page. That’s in an interesting thing to ponder as a web designer, do you risk convention for a special effect?
Update: SVN has a really great post about what went into the design of Haystack, really worth a read.
You know what drives me nuts about their infinite scrolling?
There’s a *footer* at the bottom of the page. Try reading it. It reminds me of that “Click me!” button that just runs away from your mouse cursor!
Infinite scrolling is kind of a cool idea, but it seems extremely careless to place content at the end of such pages.
Thanks for your feedback, Kyle. At this point the footer contains the usual suspects – copyright notice mostly. We’re working on some new ideas for a thin fixed footer, but there are other parts of the site that are higher priorities right now.