Mi Yodeya's updated site theme is live!

Question

UPDATE - We've pushed this live for everyone now. Thanks to those who took the time to give feedback. Please do know, being live doesn't mean we can't address further changes for you! Write an answer if you find anything that needs addressing.

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As part of implementing the new unified themes across the network, we're gradually rolling out updated site themes for each site. As of today, we have enabled your updated site theme for testing.

If you can't see it right now, that's by design! We're hoping to get feedback from you before rolling it out to everyone permanently. If you'd like to review it, here's how:

How do I enable it?

Click here and check the "Beta test new themes" option. This will turn on the new theme for all sites that have one in testing, including this one. Here's more info on how to opt in. You can uncheck the box to revert to the older theme until the site is live for everyone (note, it will take a few minutes to go into effect).

What type of feedback do we need?

On this post: Bugs related to this site's design elements

Please help us look for issues/bugs related to the theme design and how we have mapped the old theme to the new. This needs to be done within the limits of the new unified theme.

We specifically need help from the Mi Yodeya community regarding your site's logo. Because of the banner height, we're not able to put the site name under the tree and keep it legible, which removes the dot from the bottom of the question mark in the tree. If you didn't realize the tree was a question mark, I didn't either! There's more information about this in the original design post here. If you have any suggestions in this regard, we'd appreciate it!

On Meta Stack Exchange: General concerns about left nav or theming

If you have concerns or issues regarding the left nav or the overall approach we are taking to theming, then this Meta Stack Exchange post is the right place for feedback.

As you may notice, there are some unique design elements like voting arrows and tags that are being standardized in this process. Keeping these custom elements makes our ability to maintain the sites too complex and, while we're very sad to see them go, we're in a difficult position of needing to make the site designs work together so that we can continue to address feature requests and bugs that will make your Q&A experience better. This is addressed in a Meta Stack Exchange post if you want more detail.

What new themes?

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).

Thanks so much for your constructive feedback!

Answer 1

status-completed

Visited links are really hard to distinguish from unvisited ones on the front page.

Look at the screen shot in this answer. Can you tell which question I'd visited? With a lot of squinting I can, but compare it to the difference here:

Can we increase the difference between the two link colors? I understand if the two colors need to change between the old and new designs; this request is about the delta, not about the specific hue family.

Answer 2

status-completed

The pop-up Hebrew Keyboard looks worse now, with the labels for the buttons hanging off of the buttons:

Compare with how it looked when this feature was launched:

I see that the new look for the keyboard applies whether I have "Beta test new themes" turned on or not. I don't know how long it's been around for. Maybe it's related to this underlying font issue.

Answer 3

accessibility status-completed

I'm finding links really hard to see. Look at this:

"Gemara" in the first line is a link, which I can only tell by underlining -- the font color looks the same to me. This is true for both visited and unvisited links. A bigger problem comes in comments -- Al Berko's name there looks just like comments from deleted users look. That's disconcerting; Al is right here.

Compare that to the older style:

The links stand out. I can spot the links in the answer at a glance -- very helpful when scanning for linked sources! -- and the user names and "edited" text clearly say "if you click me you'll get something out of it". I think the "edited" line is particularly important there for teaching new users how the site works -- community-curated, not your own blog, etc.

This issue came up before on meta and the answer was to underline the links, like you're doing now in the new style. That was never really satisfying to me, but I figured hey, it's meta and most people don't come here; it'll be fine. But I still miss links on meta sometimes, and I'd really rather that not spread to main.

Please please please make links more visible, in addition to improving the contrast between followed and non-followed ones in places where you distinguish.

Links are very visible on Meta.SE, which also has the new design, so I'm hoping this is a per-site configuration bug and not a deeper issue. If we can customize link colors as it appears we can, could we have the old colors back? We know those worked.

I am now using a user style on both main and meta to fix the worst offenders (posts and comments), but I'd much rather not have to tune this sort of thing myself. Link colors need to be clearly differentiated from non-link text and, ideally, between visited and unvisited. Please fix!

Answer 4

Underlining pointed Hebrew in links is not good (example from here):

One solution could be to have a different colour underline, as shown here on lifehacker.com, see MSE proposal.

Answer 5

status-completed

Is tag color fixed across the network? Maybe it's just the shock of a change and I'll get used to it in a week, but the bright blue tags seem a little out of place on our background. Compare the tags to the more muted -- but still visible -- highlighting of the "active" tab:

Update: Apparently the tag color is not fixed; here's what they look like on English Language & Usage (with the new design):

Answer 6

status-completed - Comments are now rendered in Serif font. ~Catija

I like the fact that question and answer posts got their serif font back, however, the rest of the screen retains its sans-serif font, which makes it a little dizzying for me to read. Also, comments use Hebrew too, so I think it would make sense for them to also have the serif font.

Example image¹:

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¹ I know this one doesn't have a lot of Hebrew in the comments, but there are some questions that do.

Answer 7

We had this request (for linking the Hebrew Mi Yodeya text on the top right to the homepage) come up a couple of weeks ago - would anyone on your end be able to issue a fix/update that incorporates it?

Thanks!

Answer 8

status-planned

Watched tags were slightly difficult to notice with the old theme, but now it's almost impossible for me to notice unless I tilt my screen or look at it at an angle:

Answer 9

status-completed

The Hebrew keyboard is currently overlapping with the sidebar:

Answer 10

status-bydesign

This is by design. These are absolutely lovely touches that really do make the sites unique but, sadly, they also add to the complexity of the sites and have been removed. ~Catija

The new design lost the "decorations" in the header and on question titles. Was that intentional? I mean these:

This decoration added character evocative of some of our source texts, and it's a design element we've used in our publications. I understand if it doesn't fit with the new scheme, but I'm asking in case it's instead just that somebody thought it was superfluous.

Answer 11

status-review

We're testing out a change to the logo that includes the dot under the tree. Any feedback on this is welcome! ~ Catija

Brain-storming a possible solution to the missing question-mark:

To restore the question-mark and also tie the right side of the header to the left, create a pruned version of the Mi Yodeya tree consisting of just the central question mark and spiral, including the bottom dot, but removing all other branches and leaves, and place that to the left of the Hebrew text on the top-right, effectively punctuating it. ("מי יודע?‏" = "Who knows?")¹ Here's a rough mock-up of what this would look like:

Make sure that the letters and punctuation are the same color.

To further tie the header together and make the right side more attractive, consider also adding some yellow and red leaves around the Hebrew letters on the right, maybe scattered around the bottoms of the letters, reinforcing the autumnal colors with fallen leaves.

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^{1. By pulling out the question mark and making it more explicit, the right side of the header would then be offering commentary on the left side. This function fits thematically with the font on the right side, Rashi Script, which is named after the father of Rabbinic commentary.}

Answer 12

It used to be that when viewing the site in desktop view on a mobile device, the page would be in proper proportions, and you’d have to scroll left and right or zoom out to see the entire page. I kinda preferred that to whatever this is:

In this version, everything is so scrunched together, and it just overall doesn’t look very pretty.

I would much rather leave the desktop version the way it is, and a mobile viewer would have to scroll left and right to see the whole thing. If that annoys them, well, that’s why there’s a mobile site. But adapting the desktop site to a mobile device just doesn’t work.

Answer 13

I think the Hebrew words "מי יודע" on the right side of the header in the new site theme looks awkward. It's too big, and the contrast between the color of the words and the background is really sharp.

I understand it's somewhat of a "tradition" to have the words מי יודע in Rashi script, but to me it looks strange when blown up so large. Maybe we should go to a different font instead? I think that would look a lot better.

Some suggestions, for if we were going to change the font of the logo (which I highly doubt), would be either a Vilna font of some sort or maybe Narkisim. Maybe we could add nikkud to the words to: מִי יוֹדֵעַ