Not sure if it’s more relavant to Creative or Technology, so cross-posting here from: https://beehaw.org/post/743965

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!

  • HelixEnglish
    22•1 year ago

    Hey, looks awesome. Maybe you can get in touch with @HrBingR@beehaw.org who made this repository: https://github.com/HrBingR/Lemmy_CSS/

    and @UrLogicFails@beehaw.org who created an “official” colour scheme together with me

    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.

    Pinging @alyaza@beehaw.org @Gaywallet@beehaw.org @Lionir@beehaw.org just FYI about the current state of things

    • alyaza [they/she]MEnglish
      18•1 year ago

      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

  • @useful_idiotAEnglish
    13•1 year ago

    What a fantastic but subtle way to differentiate instances

  • promitheasEnglish
    6•1 year ago

    This looks very clean, well done! Personally for me the yellow is too harsh, but I still think it looks great :D

    • sintamoOPEnglish
      2•1 year ago

      Appreciate it! I think a stretch-goal for the future could be a “muted colors” toggle, to tone things down a little while keeping the rest of the changes

  • M. OrangeEnglish
    4•1 year ago

    This is amazing!

    I would like to write more, but I just woke up, so brain no worky.

  • @flora_explora@beehaw.orgEnglish
    2•1 year ago

    Amazing! Thanks so much :)

    Did I miss anything though or is this only an option for desktop PCs? I cannot install Stylebot in an android browser, right?

  • pushkaEnglish
    1•1 year ago

    Rather than using GitHub, have you heard of GreasyFork? it’s a user-style manager library website where people can install a script with one click, and their browser extension links it to that URL, so you can make new versions and it’ll automatically push it out to everyone - and auto-installs with browser sync on a new PC / new browser login

    https://greasyfork.org/en