After rolling out the new site design last week one of the people here in the office amended the connotea css to give a super-clean feel to the site. If you are browsing on Firefox and you have the mozilla greasemonkey extension then you can have a go with the following script: ConnoteaClean.user.js

It pulls in a modified set of css elements and overwrites some of the default css elements.

Alternatively if you have the Stylish firefox extension you can use that instead. You can find the modified css fragment here.