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Does anyone else feel the default theme is too bright?
I opened Tildes unlogged in an anonymous window and felt the amount of amount of white to be excessive, even for a bright theme. This feels a bit overwhelming. What do you guys think?
EDIT: I changed my theme to Solarized Dark a long time ago, I'm asking because now that an account is not required to view the content a lot of people will get to know Tildes, so maybe the default theme could be improved
That's only available when not logged in.
You can assign a theme in your profile settings, it is activated when you log in.
It is cool that there's a selector (which I just tested), and that it's actually persistent. I still find the theme excessively white, though! I don't remember if I ever saw a website that bright.
I'd say almost all white-background sites are at least that bright in general - https://google.com sure is, any Wikipedia page is very white, https://old.reddit.com seems even more bright, the reddit redesign is quite similar, etc.
(I originally planned for Solarized Light to be the default theme on Tildes, but people complained about the beige/yellow so much that I added the white theme)
I get really offput seeing Tildes in a bright CSS theme. This could be because I'm a natural photophobe: I savor in the extremes of f.lux at night, I jailbroke my current phone solely to get dark mode, and I wear blue-light filtered glasses in front of my computer screens at work.
To echo mrbig, I agree that pure-as-the-driven-snow backgrounds are typically seen in fast-transaction websites. To your own point, reddit is/was standoffish by its bone white design, and perhaps that's why it garnered a more esoteric crowd initially.
I normally use a night mode filter on websites that require reading, but for Tildes, I'm fine with only using the Solarized Dark theme as a default. Now, I don't pretend to speak for everyone, but I think the majority of us hang out on Tildes to read comments. Clicking a link brings me to a wholly different site that feels like "the rest of the Internet", and I'd rather come back to a more eye-friendly site to see the comments.
Due to the larger amount of textual reading, and the general programmer crowd associated with this site, I don't think it's unreasonable for the default theme to be darker (a dark terminal has practical benefits, as well). However, a polarizing change could scare away newcomers, even though I think the novelty of a website that doesn't burn your eyes out has its own merits, too.
Perhaps the contentiousness of a site's color scheme isn't such a black-and-white issue (pun intended), and perhaps I'm the only one who sees the uncanny valley of an aged booklet palette on my phone. So maybe I'm just the outlier who wants a dark default, but I also haven't seen any complaints on it, either.
I see that. Because I haven't used those websites defaults for a long time, I forgot how bright they were. Reddit's main page is busier than Tildes's, which makes the white stand out a bit less. But
google.comis almost entirely white.I think the difference is that Google's main page is not a place where you stay a lot, you usually go to the results very quickly. The results page has more elements. I think the lack of images might be what makes the white pop-out more for me on Tildes. Just my two cents.
I like Solarized Light. It's my default theme. It removes the brightness, without being all black and dark and gloomy.
While I love the current themes (currently using solarized dark), are there plans to include other "programmer friendly" themes in the foreseeable future? I'm a massive sucker for the Monokai colorscheme.
Sure, any theme can be added pretty easily. For example, this is pretty much the entirety of the Dracula theme: https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/blob/master/tildes/scss/themes/_dracula.scss
Are you hoping for Monokai, or Monokai Pro (the one you linked to)? They seem to use different colors.
A webpage cannot be brighter than the screen brightness setting. Should be about the same as brightness of a sheet of paper under your lights. Maybe you should lower screen brightness
I really like it. In my opinion off white looks worse and this currently looks simplistic, modern, easily readible, and pleasant. I'm sure the talented people (who design for their career) at Instagram, Google, Twitter, Reddit, etc. would agree with me and know a little something about UI design.
I think it's a bit too bright yes, it also lacks color and personality. I would like to see some of the colors of the logo reused on the page. I'm sure a talented designer could improve it.
Pretty sure one already designed it ;-p
You can change your theme here: https://tildes.net/settings
The themes with dark backgrounds have too-bright text and it messes with my eyes. And I can barely read Solarized Dark so I'm still running the light theme.
Try the "Atom One Dark" theme out again now. After reading your comment I looked through the dark themes and realized that the text on that theme had been accidentally set to full white when it shouldn't have been, so it was too bright. I've fixed it now, so it might work better for you.
This is so much better. Thank you.
There is a Solarized Light theme that you might enjoy.
I changed my theme a long time ago, I'm asking because now that an account is not required to view the content a lot of people will get to know Tildes, so maybe the default theme could be improved
Hmm. Theme contest? That could be fun. :)
I suppose so! If mockups are accepted I'love to be part of it.... my CSS fu is basically inexistent right now.