Re: The Workplace updated site theme is ready for testing!
Wasted space with the introduction of a left margin toolbar that nobody asked for.
When we're voting to close a question that we suspect is a duplicate, "Related Questions" is no longer displayed on the right margin. So we have to do additional work to find that duplicate.
Answering there should ping the Jon Ericson (the guy who rolled out the changes). If you take a look at the liked question, you'll see where others have reported issues and gotten a response back.
Jon's a great guy, but he might not be scanning threads in all Meta sites looking for issues to address - he's more likely to follow his notifications for his questions.
You've linked to this question in your question here, but don't seem to have contributed your own issues there. I'd really advise that you do that.
The design changes were made across the network to enable the team to maintain design elements on 174 different sites. Before this, each (non-beta) site had its own custom CSS and making a change to the UI often broke something, somewhere because of that. That's a done deal; SE isn't going to roll that back. With the new design framework, sites can individually customize some things (like colors, the header graphic, fonts, and some other things), but the underlying structure, including the left column and the responsive design, remains the same for everybody.
I agree that the left column is annoyingly wasteful. Fortunately you can turn that off. That still doesn't help with the right column being too greedy on smaller displays, but it still helps a lot.
See the posts linked in the post that you linked to for more information on this design update.
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Can we eliminate the close reason "Primarily Opinion Based"?
Is there anything we can do to highlight the country/culture specific tags?
Can we decrease the vertical height for each question in a list?
Can we improve the text of the "Advice on what to do" close reason?