We're actually almost done with the redesign. Its looking great. The background isn't going to be darker though; we are going with animated gifs tiled across the background. Dancing hamsters mostly. The text is a nice bright yellow and seems to look best in comic sans for the font, but i also really like sand. We also have this cool animated graphic that follows your cursor (and we changed the cursor too!). We found this great mp3 that plays on a loop, and the buttons/tabs/links all make different sounds when you hover and click on them.
The best part though is the cool flash intro page. We made 14 different intro pages for different parts of the site like the front page, entering the forum, starting a post and so on. Its taken a long time, the flash videos amount to more than 3 hours of total play time.
We are also incorporating A LOT of ajax so pretty much everything slides or flips or collapses or pops up (cool sound effects on most of this too). Its very modern looking. Everything has a drop shadow and/or a gradient of some sort (even the ads), and everything is glossy and has reflections. And if you thought coverflow in safari was rad, just wait 'til you see all the places we have found to incorporate a web version of it!
Speaking of the ads we found a really clever unobtrusive way to display them. They are tiled around the content in a ring and stay fixed as you scroll since they are all in frames. This means the site can still make money and the ads stay out of your way (other than the inline, popup, video, and audio ads).
This provides less space for the content, but its ok because we're reducing content to tweet size so Arn and Eric can post articles while they are on the go. You'll also get updates on all events in arn's life (except for clapping he says when he is clapping he will tell us that he is sneezing or something since he thinks clapping is too private) since people always seem curious about his life.
There is a reason its been taking so long, we have a lot of great things (way more than I have already revealed) - the new logo was designed by this firm in london that designed the next olympic logo. We're very excited and hope you will just be patient and wait a tiny bit longer.