I love the design and usability of hacker news. It's minimal, efficient, non-distracting, consistent and puts content first. I wish more news website would be like that.

The libreoffice website, on the other hand, has a lot of visual elements (icons, colors) that don't really fit well with each other.

Visual-heavy websites can be quite nice, but they need to be really thought through.

I'm not going to get into the whole hacker news is magnificent debate.We all know most users are screaming for improvement. As for the libreofice site the only color I see is green which is what they usually use and the libreoffice icons. What am I missing ?

> We all know most users are screaming for improvement.

Do they? A few times a year we get a "I made a better UI for HN" article and almost without fail everyone seems to respond "This is unneeded and worse. This reduces usability".

Two horrible abortions of a design don't make a right. :P

With so many awesome people in this world, I'd like to think there is at least 1 great designer and front end guy who would donate time to completely scrap the current design and give it a facelift.

Who wouldn't want that on their resume, "I designed the website for LIBREOFFICE." That's deserving of major kudos, at least in my book.

Yes but hacker news is very minimalistic, I think minimalistic and ugly is ok. But on their website its hard to understand what is happening.

It's actually pretty straight forward.A featured selection of new stuff and then new features categorized, some with screenshots.