Exactly a week later, hello again!

I was so flattered by people’s reaction to my last post - thank you for making me feel so welcomed by this community! I’m still toying with icon redesigns, but I noticed that people were equally (if not more) interested in the theme ideas I posted - so I’ve spent the last week trying to make them a reality! I call them Hive Light and Hive Dark, and I think they’re ready to share with you all.

I was able to incorporate lots of tweaks to Beehaw’s UI, including:

  • Customisable levels of minimalisation
  • Consistent padding and spacing site-wide, increasing legibility and cleanliness without sacrificing too much information density
  • Repositioned various UI/UX elements to make Beehaw easier and more intuitive to navigate
  • Consistent bee-themed colors! Lots of yellows, browns, and blues that play nice with each other and pass accessibility standards
  • Hover effects to reduce unnecessary line breaks with long hyperlinks
  • And more! But not that much more, it’s just some CSS after all ;)

Hive Light:

Hive Dark:

There are more screenshots on the GitHub!

Installation is pretty simple as well:

  • Install Stylebot - this was the only CSS extension I found that worked reliably across browsers and consistently applied settings. YMMV with other extensions - Stylus just didn’t work well for me :(
  • Check your Beehaw settings and select “darkly” if you want to use Hive Dark, and “litely” if you want to use Hive Light
  • Copy and paste the contents of either Hive_Light_Theme.css or Hive_Dark_Theme.css from the GitHub page into the “code” section of Stylebot
  • Et Violà!

This isn’t my first time designing a UI, but it is my first time doing it with CSS edits, so I fully expect there to bugs and inefficient code. I would love to hear your feedback and incorporate new ideas into future versions. And feel free to copy my homework! If I can figure out this CSS stuff in a week, so can you, and I’d love to see what other people create.

One caveat: the Lemmy v0.18.0 release includes lots of (really awesome) updates to Lemmy-UI that will break this theme. I don’t know when Beehaw will update, but I imagine it’s imminent, so there will be more work to be done soon I’m afraid.

Thanks for reading, and take care!

  • sintamo@beehaw.orgOP
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    1 year ago

    Awesome! Happy to have provided a semi-decent place to start. I’m curious what things you end up tweaking :)

    • Whimseymimple@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      Just a few tweaks, because you’ve done so much of the work that I needed already. (I think the hardest part of re-theming is picking colors that work well, and you did that to perfection.)

      • upvote hover and activated upvote color
      • navbar links and hover
      • comment text color (this bit is personal preference due to some color deficiencies on my end)
      • updated info root color to match theme
      • change modlog colors to my own preferences based on your themed colors

      One of the reasons I find theming colors so difficult is that I have color determination deficiencies (not full color blindness). One reason I love my web services job is that my organization has a marketing team to determine the colors, so I can do my CSS theming for our products based off the pre-determined hex codes. :D