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We rolled out the new site theme for TeX. It is now live.

What new theme?

If you're like, "What the heck are you talking about?", then you should read the Meta Stack Exchange post entitled Rollout of new network site themes (and maybe the posts it links to for the full background).

Your help needed

You are one of the first sites to get a new, unified theme. I previously posted the designs for theme in meta. The feedback given to that post was considered prior to rolling out the theme. Please help us look for issues/bugs and post the details (including images where needed) as an answer below.

If you have concerns or issues regarding the left nav then this Meta Stack Exchange post is the right place for feedback. If you have issues with any functionality that is unrelated to the new theme, then please post a new question.

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  • 62
    As far as I can see, NONE of our suggestion has been taken into consideration.
    – egreg
    Aug 9, 2018 at 16:17
  • 8
    badge completion indicator should be darker. I barely see the progress.
    – naphaneal
    Aug 9, 2018 at 16:32
  • 40
    The new site is absolutely awful.
    – Alan Munn
    Aug 9, 2018 at 16:42
  • 11
    Looks as if StackExchange is over the hill.
    – AlexG
    Aug 9, 2018 at 18:14
  • 15
    If I knew this existed I wouldn't have ranted in chat about how the new site looks. Is it too late to propose the following changes to the new site design: revert every change made from the previous (yes, I read the other posts about the redesign beforehand)
    – Skillmon
    Aug 9, 2018 at 18:25
  • 35
    "You are one of the first sites to get a new, unified theme": Please, don't spread the infection any further...
    – Massimo Ortolano
    Aug 9, 2018 at 18:30
  • 43
    It has to be said the new theme is pretty bad, the only part of the screen of interest, the central part with the posts is squeezed into a narrow band, the left sidebar is far too wide and so almost entirely a waste of space and the right side bar with occasionally useful links is far too prominent. this is supposed to be a forum about typesetting and it looks like a complete design disaster.
    – David Carlisle
    Aug 9, 2018 at 20:15
  • 7
    This “question” does not show up on the front page of tex.meta.stackexchange.com (probably because it's so heavily downvoted) and it does not show up in the “Featured on Meta” sidebar (only the “TUGboat open-access survey” question shows up), so it is very hard to get to this one unless one knows it's there.
    – ShreevatsaR
    Aug 10, 2018 at 20:01
  • 5
    @ShreevatsaR A combined consequence of the ugly new theme and some rules of SE.
    – egreg
    Aug 10, 2018 at 20:50
  • 3
    @ShreevatsaR I've made a new Meta question containing a link which can be upvoted and serve as a proxy. tex.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7820
    – Alan Munn
    Aug 10, 2018 at 21:27
  • 29
    This community almost never downvotes threads when the score is already negative (the score usually stops at -1), so I believe this is a good indicator of how upset TeX.sx is with the Powers That Be.
    – Paulo Cereda
    Aug 12, 2018 at 13:47
  • 11
    Despite all, required reading.
    – Raphael
    Aug 13, 2018 at 13:23
  • 10
    It should be written very huge on the top of page that users of this site do not represent the design used here, which is a complete disaster as David said..
    – Sigur
    Aug 13, 2018 at 17:00
  • 4
    The redesign is an unmitigated disaster. You have here a large community who cares deeply about design: Take their advice seriously.
    – mforbes
    Aug 21, 2018 at 7:43
  • Joe, I appreciate SE and I know you are trying to keep your codebase under control across a growing family of sites. I just want to let you know that, even though I'm not a major user here, I still miss the old background image behind the header. The new one is very stark compared to what I remember of the old. Is there any way to bring the old header graphics back, even if the rest doesn't change? Thanks in advance for your time and consideration!
    – cxw
    Dec 10, 2018 at 15:44

38 Answers 38

Reset to default
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Tab colours

With the new non-white background colour (thank you for that change!) the "tabs" for sorting questions or in the review queue don't integrate seamless into the rest of the page any more. They are still white.

One could argue that this is intended for tags that are not selected since they stand out from the background that way, but it looks odd for the active tab, which looks like it should be connected seamlessly to the content below it (it has no lower border).

Tabs to sort answers

the effect is more visible if the background colour is a bit darker:

Tabs to sort answers with background colour turned to pink so the effect is more pronounced

(added by @Milo) Note the problem also occurs on your user profile page:

enter image description here

enter image description here

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    It would also be nice if the orange stackoverflow colour of the active tab would be replaced with our red colour.
    – samcarter_is_at_topanswers.xyz
    Aug 12, 2018 at 12:08
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    @samcarter Actually, I quite like the orange, but given that the left sidebar is red and that on meta at least the tabs aren't orange either, this is definitely worth a look. Consistency seems more important here than my fondness for orange.
    – moewe
    Aug 12, 2018 at 12:39
  • This has been fixed. Selected tab colors now inherit the theme's primary color.
    – Aaron Shekey
    Aug 15, 2018 at 22:10
  • 3
    @AaronShekey If one hovers over the tab the line still becomes orange. Would it be possible to use the lighter red, which is used for hovering over normal links?
    – samcarter_is_at_topanswers.xyz
    Aug 15, 2018 at 23:15
  • @AaronShekey Thank you. I second samcarter's comment that the orange on hover looks a bit odd.
    – moewe
    Aug 16, 2018 at 4:40
  • Yeah, I don't think the selected tab needs any hover state at all, and that's how we plan to handle our tabs in the future. I'll kill the hover state here. On it!
    – Aaron Shekey
    Aug 16, 2018 at 14:53
  • The hover state on the selected tab no longer highlights on our unified themes. This'll go live in the next build.
    – Aaron Shekey
    Aug 16, 2018 at 22:05
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    @AaronShekey While it is true that the upper boarder no longer changes colour on hovering, the background of the tab still switches colour from the background colour of our site in normal state to white if hovering.
    – samcarter_is_at_topanswers.xyz
    Aug 18, 2018 at 12:42
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    @AaronShekey Additionally to samcarters observation above I also noticed that the mouse pointer treats the active tab as not clickable (i.e. it stays an arrow and does not become a hand on Windows), which might be right, but looks a bit odd to me.
    – moewe
    Aug 18, 2018 at 12:44
  • @AaronShekey See this comparison between hovering and not hovering: i.stack.imgur.com/8Arfa.png
    – samcarter_is_at_topanswers.xyz
    Aug 18, 2018 at 12:48
  • @AaronShekey Actually, the thing is even more confusing because at least here the active tab is clickable and jumps back to an anchor on the page. So I really think it makes sense to get the hand back.
    – moewe
    Aug 18, 2018 at 12:51
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Answer/votes/views boxes not aligned

The problem of the not rounded borders of the answers boxes has been solved already. But what is even more annoying to me is the fact that these boxes are not at all aligned vertically. See the following picture that illustrates the problem:

enter image description here

While “votes” and “views” are aligned, the text “answers” is shifted downwards a bit and another bit if there is a border around this box (i.e. if there is at least one answer). This is not only a problem on this site, but, as far as I can see, it appears on other SX pages as well that already use the new theme. The effect also appears in the questions tab of the user’s activity page.

The problem can be solved quite easily by setting the padding of all three boxes to the same value via CSS (but consider the border that adds another 2px!).

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  • Three years later, the "votes" box is still not aligned to its neighbors ...
    – Jasper Habicht
    Nov 9, 2021 at 7:53
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I'm not sure if this is a problem with the new theme (not many questions here have so many answers that sorting is really needed) but I just realized that you can only sort answers so that the oldest answer is on top. I find this odd as normally if I sort by date I'm interested in what's new and don't want to have to scroll all the page down first.

enter image description here

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    "Active" give you the newest answer (of course it takes into account edits as well). But this seems to be the same for the old theme as well
    – moewe
    Aug 16, 2018 at 10:19
  • 5
    @moewe yes active is a work around but not the same as newest due to the edits. At best I would like if "oldest" would be "date" and would switch between both directions.
    – Ulrike Fischer
    Aug 16, 2018 at 10:39
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Please, remove the serif fonts in titles (and everywhere), they simply do not fit in.

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  • Is this answer ironically missing a 'sans'?
    – Alan Munn
    Aug 9, 2018 at 22:38
  • @AlanMunn I see a serif font here: i.stack.imgur.com/W7kJ2.png
    – yo'
    Aug 9, 2018 at 22:40
  • Yes, but I thought we wanted that. tex.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7748/2693
    – Alan Munn
    Aug 9, 2018 at 22:44
  • @AlanMunn That's an opinion I strongly do not share.
    – yo'
    Aug 9, 2018 at 22:44
  • Seems like a matter of taste that will not be resolved to everyone's satisfaction.
    – Jon 'links in bio' Ericson
    Aug 9, 2018 at 23:49
  • 5
    I do like my serif fonts, but since some apparently unchangeable network-wide bits on this page are in sans serif (in particular the "All Questions", " Tags", "Questions tagged" headings and the side bar) I feel that the mix of sans serif and serif does not look slick any more, it has become a weird mixture with no real motivation. I vote to leave the serifs off completely.
    – moewe
    Aug 10, 2018 at 7:11
  • 8
    Just to add that in the old design the sans-serif/serif dichotomy was motived: tex.meta.stackexchange.com/q/638 shows clearly that heading-like content was serif while body-level content was sans serif. This has been lost with the advent of the unchangeable side-wide sans serif and simply does not work any more.
    – moewe
    Aug 10, 2018 at 7:36
  • 3
    @JonEricson The original request for more serifs Alan referred to was actually asking for serifs in places where the new design does not seem to allow them (at least that is how I read the responses we got and the result we have obtained so far), I'm quite sure that the consensus is that the current mix of sans serif and serif on this site looks odd at best. In particular I believe that this misunderstanding should not be used as a reason to ignore this area completely citing a matter of taste where not everyone can be pleased.
    – moewe
    Aug 10, 2018 at 20:36
  • 4
    Yes, I completely agree. I was assuming that the main site was still using a serifed font when I made my comment, but if the main font has to be sans serif, then having a mixture is simply not good. And since this is a site dedicated to good typography, it's really bad to have such a clash.
    – Alan Munn
    Aug 10, 2018 at 23:27
  • 2
    We've unified on sans serif here.
    – Aaron Shekey
    Aug 15, 2018 at 22:13
  • 1
    @AaronShekey Good. Thank you. I'm sad to see the serifs gone, but I think that was the sensible decision in this situation.
    – moewe
    Aug 16, 2018 at 4:41
  • 7
    Well, the "sensible" would be keeping more serif fonts and more per-site features. This is simple the "less bad".
    – yo'
    Aug 16, 2018 at 6:42
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This seems to have been fixed in the course of revisiting links for https://tex.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7832/35864

Border below images

On meta links are marked with an underline (which I personally quite like, this is definitely an option that could be explored re the links on the main site, which are hard to notice at times https://tex.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7832/35864). Since images are usually included with a link here that means that images have a "bottom border" now, which looks odd

screenshot of a question on this site with an image, a pixeled border runs along the bottom of the image

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  • 4
    Thanks for using a very good picture to demonstrate this :)
    – Skillmon
    Aug 13, 2018 at 18:02
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I actually like the new layout because the avatars and screen shots look now soooo much better in comparison. ;-)

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    Although this is intended as a joke I have no doubts that it will be used disingenuously to "prove" that some people like the new layout.
    – Alan Munn
    Aug 10, 2018 at 19:49
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Missing line below all tabs with a count badge

The faint gray line below all inactive tabs with a blue count badge is missing for zoom levels unequal to 100% (both smaller and higher zoom level)

enter image description here

As long as I hover over the tab, the line is visible again (see the "favorites" tab in the picture below):

enter image description here

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Why don't make the page like an IDE (integrated development environment, such as Visual Studio 2017 Community Edition, any Video editing software, Adobe Illustrator, etc) in which users can freely change the look and feel of their work-space by hiding, showing, enabling, disabling, activating, deactivating, adding, removing, docking, undocking, repositioning the tool windows, menus, font colors, font type, style-sheet, skins, etc such that users and the developers are always happy with their own decision?

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