GitHub redesigns repos ‘for everyday use’

Social coding site GitHub has just launched Repository Next, a new design for repos that puts the focus on content, speed, and everyday use.

The new look and feel comes several months after the launch of new profile pages and more than a year after the company launched its spectacular page generator for developers’ projects on GitHub.

Back to the new design.

“We’ve been working toward this redesign for almost a year now, and we think it’s a massive step forward in using GitHub,” says lead designer Kyle Neath in a blog post.

“GitHub is a product you use every day,” he continued. “We’ve focused on this and optimized for how people interact with GitHub on a daily basis. The next time you click through on a notification email, you’ll find a dramatic reduction of persistent section navigation cluttering up the page.”

The team also simplified the interface to bring more focus to the code itself, including pull requests and issues. Other optimizations were all about decreasing load times thanks to some pjax magic.

“It’s a big change and may take a few days to feel right,” Neath said. “As always, this is just the beginning. This redesign paves the way for an even faster, more focused GitHub. And we can’t wait to see what the future holds.”

The rollout starts today and will be complete within the next couple weeks.

GitHub, famously bootstrapped for most of its half-decade lifespan, took a record-breaking $100 million Series A about a year ago. The cash, which came from Andreessen Horowitz, was specifically intended to fund products and projects like this — things that add polish to an already popular application, making it more appealing to the enterprise customers who supply the company’s income.