Why did CodeCademy change the older formatting of the printable cheat sheets

Hi guys,

I was extremely happy with those cheat sheets. A year ago, I went back to all my courses and started saving the cheat sheets that associated with them once I found this little awesome feature. I’m now back to learning (one year later) and I found that you guys changed the printable version’s style of the cheat sheet.

The new format makes it really hard and a bit overwhelming to skim through as you go about coding a project as a beginner, mainly because you have code and explanation text mixed instead of code on the right and text on the left. I’ve attached the before and after example of your old versus new sheets.

I looked through the different topics in the forum and found one where @sonnynomnom was talking about cheatsheets 2.0. Perhaps this is when they changed the cheatsheets to the old format?

I am in love with the cheatsheets idea and the very concept that this was an initiative at Codecademy shows that they actually understand the process a learner goes through past finishing a chapter and moving forward.

However, is there any possibility that you revert to that older style? perhaps carry a survey and see if people found it far more helpful to use the older format? or maybe release them in a way/ format that makes it easier for me to restructure the sheets to the older format?

Or has anyone in the forum saved all the cheat sheets that were available in the old printable style at least for some of the Web Development courses?

Advantages of the older format:

  1. A better-established text hierarchy which made it intuitive to index and visually search down a list to find what you need
  2. An inverse color distinction between code syntax and explanation text
  3. A side by side format of code versus explanation which made it even easier to search through the cheat sheet when you need to quickly refresh your memory about a specific topic among a list
  4. This perhaps is very subjective but it truly reflected Codecademy’s brand in a way where people who’d see you looking at those sheets would easily associate beginner’s code learning with Codecademy.

Old printable format:

New printable format:

p.s. if anyone wants what I managed to save from the old printable format of the cheat sheets I managed to save before, here they are:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1p9ksnQsk5upJMghClFIv3c15LUFL4Wmz

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Hi, I’m a product manager here at codecademy. Thanks so much for taking the time to write such thoughtful feedback! You make some great points about the text hierachy and ease of finding content! For context, we changed the background color because the black backgrounds were draining a lot of printer ink for folks who were printing these out.

We will consider the rest of this feedback and see how we can incorporate a faster way to skim these pdfs! Thank you again :slight_smile:

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Natalia,

A day after I wrote my feedback I actually realized the printer ink issue. You’re spot on.

As for the other points, please feel free to reach out to me for further feedback or use me as a lab rat for a new format. I’m a huge fan of Codecademy.

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Thank you so much @natalia-rodriguez, I noticed the new layout today and it solves most of the pain with the predecessor!

Thank you guys for such a great product.

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For sure. And thanks @natalia-rodriguez. And Ahmed, keep these feedback coming!