New TeX site theme coming soon

Question

As mentioned on meta.stackexchange.com several months ago, all network sites will be getting updated themes. TeX is one of the first sites that will be updated. As such, I'm posting the design here so you can see how the new theming will be applied to your site.

I want to acknowledge that this will be a painful change for sites that have rich, custom themes. I want to reinforce that the theme changes are a required step to deliver ongoing value to the sites with as little friction as possible. We released changes for tag watching (aka favorite tags) this week and will be releasing a beta of custom question list functionality soon. The only way to make sure Q&A improvements are quickly available to all Q&A sites is to fix our themes.

To recap from the original post on themes:

Every Q&A site has its own theme. But there is great inequality in the level of theming that we support. A few (~10) get Cadillac treatment, some (<50) are more like a Honda, while most (~100) are a Yugo. The reality is we created a theming system that we didn't have the design resources to fully support, thus the inequity. In addition, as currently defined, our theming gets in the way of releasing new features on the sites.

In order to deliver the left nav, responsive design and future improvements to all sites we've created a more standardized way to support theming. This will reduce the burden of supporting designs as we make Q&A improvements. The result is that most sites will see an improvement in the level of theming that they can get. While some sites will see a reduction. All of Q&A (Enterprise, Teams, etc) will standardize on this new theming scheme.

- Ch-ch-ch-changes: Left nav, responsive design, & themes

Next steps

Schedule

• Early July: Collect and respond to feedback from this post
• Late July: Update the site

Feedback

Please review the mockups and feel free to provide constructive feedback in answers below. We aren't going to revisit the choices we've made around simplification, so it would be more productive to keep feedback focused on the application of the new theme scheme.

Note: I'm leaving on vacation later today, but didn't want to delay getting these designs posted. As such, I'll have limited time/ability to respond to feedback and comments until I return.

Enough talk, show me the money

You can click on the mockups below to see the image in a larger format.

TeX

Answer 1

status-declined After further discussion we have decided to keep the unified design for tags. While we appreciate the desire from communities who have them to keep them, it does add to the support cost. - Joe

Tags

Curly brackets

In case the tags can be customised I would love to see the curly brackets come back

{foo}

instead of the bland blue rectangle.

Colour

status-completed We have allowed the color of tags and links to be modified so that it matches better with the site colors. - Joe

The blue of the tag buttons does not blend in particularly well with the warmer colour scheme of the rest of the site.

Links in the right column/sidebar

In the screenshot the links are blue and don't match the colour of other links on this site. I'd prefer links matching the link colours in the middle column.

Answer 2

status-completed We will take another run at the top site banner and take into account the feedback below where possible. - Joe

Background image

The placement of the background picture looks odd.

For all who don't understand what I am talking about because the contrast is too low for their screen, here is a higher contrast version of the image from the question:

For me the most important point:

• it seems to be much smaller, making it impossible to recognise any of the writing/symbols. I think it would be better to make it a bit wider, even if this means cutting of even more of the image.

  

Some other comments which might be harder to address:

• the alignment on the right hand site looks like the background image is trying to hide.

• The slightly darker shading of the triangle in the centre was previously used to emphasis the {TeX} logo which was aligned on top of it. Now most of the background image is basically invisible - besides a inexplicable darker region at the top right. Without knowing the background image, I'd think that my screen is broken...

  Quick and dirty mock-up without the dark triangle:

  

• Previously the background image was used behind text and other elements. For this purpose the very low contrast was ok, but for its new usage as pattern (like in https://i.sstatic.net/yz4ll.png) the contrast is too low.

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In the way it is currently used, I'd say it would be better to leave it completely out, unless you can fix some of my points above.

Answer 3

Please, decide whether:

1. The design is professional typesetting-looking as it was before, i.e., not using sans-serif fonts, not using rounded corners, not using button-like things, boxed links etc.

Or

2. The site looks like SO in dark pink.

The thing you propose is a mess between the two that looks like nothing. Note that in the old design, originally, basically every little bit was well thought out. This is being lost slowly and this big change will simply make it disappear. Just to mention a few that are in the old one:

• There are no prominent boxes. All boxes are very subtle in toned colours, without borders. This is lost.
• There are moreorless no vertical lines and no rounded corners. The header is designed in such a way that it looks like a table header from a well-typeset book. This is lost.
• There are almost no cold colours. The first introduced was the black top bar (yes, black looks cold in this context), and there's the bounty stuff that's bright blue. But that's it. This is lost.
• All text larger than paragraph size is sans-serif, giving a printed-like look. This is lost.
• The header contains a well balanced showcase of interesting typographical examples possible in (La)TeX. Moving it to some corner and giving it a very little space means this is lost.
• There are beautifully and well drawn pen-like vote arrows. This is lost.
• I think I could continue for quite a long time if I saw more screenshots.

Request

Since it seems you are not willing to take variant one from the options above, go for variant two. Simply drop all the stuff that resembles professional typesetting, especially:

1. Drop the warm colours. Choose a neutral SO/SE-complaint colour scheme in which all the bright green and blue does not stand out.
2. Drop serif fonts.
3. Drop the header images altogether (the ones now on the right), just maybe keep the {TEX} logo, in newly chosen colours. However, drop the mechanical print effect on the logo as it doesn't make any sense any more.

Bottom line

The site will necessarily lose it's unique look that distinguished it from other TeX support sites out there. Nobody else than SE designers and TeX.SE users have ever put that much effort into having a professional-looking TeX site, and it's gonna be a big loss. I'm just saying.

Answer 4

So basically we go back to Area51.

Why don't you just delete the CSS file altogether? That would save you a lot of time and money and we would hardly ever notice it.

The image below was a joke but thanks for taking it seriously.

Answer 5

Type status-completed

The sans serif type in the main column (center, with the question links) should be serif like in the current model. The “asked/answered/modified” tags can be sans serif like now.

Rectangles status-declined

There are too many boxed rectangles, whereas the current model has none. The proposed shape is too much “Stack Overflow” alike.

Tags status-declined

They should continue to be braced.