The idea there is to feature more than just articles, so the user can submit designs, too. I'm not sure that'll stay or not, it's just an attempt to appeal to the visual person a bit more.
Re: overwhelming - Yeah, I agree, I've tried to keep everything toned done as much as possible, but there's probably still too much visual noise.
Oh so there is an option to submit a design.. is that for a live site? That's a pretty cool idea.
Hopefully you can attract a healthy designer community there - one of the things that seems like a recurring theme around here is that there are very few designers in this crowd. I can think of maybe 2 or 3.
I would split out design based voting and leave interesting news as text, HN-style. The way it's currently presented just doesn't incite me to really click or interact, and seems weird - reminds me a lot of Evernote, actually. I may be an outlier, though.
I'm gonna go ahead and suggest the opposite: keep the news as is, but reduce the textual noise. That is, remove the tld, "upvote," submitter, etc. and only show them on mouseover. These are all distractions from the important content, the article names. That's why the NY Times skimmer works; all the metadata is absent.
Since your audience are front-end designers and developers, they like to look at pretty things. The Hacker News crowd strives for functionality.
which I personally find pretty readable. But the appeal of that experiment is probably due to the fact that it's less busy than Webdesignerd, so I'll work on that.
I got a little overloaded looking at it; but I'm also not a designer.
I think the site looks nice... just a little overwhelming.