Handmade Network»Blog

[Notice] Surfing with style

Greetings, everyone,

It's no secret that the current site style suffers from a few issues (slow repaint time in some browsers, visually distracting backgrounds, and a fair share of strange behaviour/bugs with resizing). We've been hinting at a redesign in the works for a while, and though we are still waiting on consultation in terms of design direction for that, I have decided to go ahead and start iterating on the design now rather than put off changes much longer.

Starting tomorrow, I will be pushing design iterations to the site, live. Comments, suggestions, and tips should be posted to the Feedback forum, which I'll be monitoring as I work on the design. We've opted to do it this way rather than deploy the iterated design to a subset of users because of two main considerations.
  1. We don't yet have infrastructure in place to deploy alternate versions of the entire site to certain users or over a different URL/port. This would not take terribly long to set up, but we are prioritizing other work more highly at the moment.

  2. We are still formally in Beta until the v1.0 release hits with all of the features we originally planned to include, and an iteration on the public design before launch does not seem entirely out of line with that in mind.

Some things to keep in mind as design changes roll out:
  1. If something looks off, first try refreshing (be sure to use your browser's cache-clearing refresh to ensure that old styles/images/fonts aren't being used) before reporting in the Site Feedback
  2. Your brain/computer might work differently from ours! If something becomes significantly less readable, harder to navigate, or harder to find, this is a bug we need to fix. We want the site to be usable by everyone across as many devices and browsers as possible. (We make no guarantees about old noncompliant versions of IE, but will attempt to make the style degrade somewhat gracefully).
  3. I, the main frontend dev, am doing this in the free time I can spare from university, so it may take me a while to address feedback. That doesn't mean I'm not listening!

Again, please give us feedback and as always, donating on our Patreon makes it easier for us to improve the site.

Cheers,
Andrew
Abner Coimbre,
ChronalDragon
Starting tomorrow, I will be pushing design iterations to the site, live.

Bumping this up so people remember. These are live iterations being worked on. Feedback welcome on this thread.
Neo Ar,
I know this is live WIP but I see the current iteration of the site has a dark theme.
I just want to throw in my two cents that I personally prefer a light theme, so I hope the site continues to support both options! :)
The_8th_mage,
I like dark ones, better for unlit environments.
Neo Ar,
I used to use dark themes for everything but it turns out the best thing for the eyes is black text on white background with a properly lit environment, lower monitor brightness, keeping an appropriate distance from the monitor, appropriately sized font for your vision, and using something like f.lux (I use redshift).

I have pretty bad vision, so I try to do what I can for it since I'm staring at a monitor all day both for work and hobby :)
Andrew Chronister, Edited by Andrew Chronister on
I should clarify the reason I've pushed the site to dark-theme only is so that I only have to iterate one design. Once it's nearing a reasonably final version, I'll add back in a new light theme based on the solidified candidate. Apologies for any inconvenience in the meantime!

Edit: I decided to just take the hit and keep the light theme updated as much as possible. You should be able to use it once more.
Mikkel ,
I like this new front page http://i.imgur.com/A2SUxTt.png with things grouped by forum, however I would still like to be able to access the old list of all posts from time to time
Tomasz Różański,
Dark theme has some issues regarding text to background contrast:
http://wave.webaim.org/report#/https://handmade.network/home