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.
as well as myself, you can reach me in Discord or Matrix, just send me your respective username in a Lemmy PN and I'll contact you.
I am one of the backend admins and I'm pretty sure we can make this official somehow. I will talk to the site admins (=moderators, community managers, bosses) about this. I'm sure we would like to have a few Beehaw-specific themes to select for our users.
already took notice of this and dropped it in the community discord for additional feedback (although i think i linked to the creative crosspost, not this tech one), it'd be good to make it official if possible and have a few options to pick from with more instance-aligned themes yeah