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!

  • Thalestr@beehaw.orgEnglish
    8·
    1 year ago

    Woah, very nice! Would be cool to see these as official themes in the settings page.

    • sintamo@beehaw.orgOPEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      You’re too kind :) I think themes are a great way to differentiate instances, and having some community-made Beehaw themes available would be really cool!

    • Nerd02@forum.basedcount.comEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      It’s actually pretty easy on the admin side, there’s a guide on the lemmy docs and all of that. If the beehaw admins saw this they could add it without too much trouble.

  • sheinar@beehaw.orgEnglish
    6·
    1 year ago

    Just given Hive Dark a go and it looks really good! Definitely adds a lot to the feel of Beehaw. Thanks a lot, and good luck with the inevitable v0.18.0 breakage!

    • Dee@beehaw.orgEnglish
      5·
      1 year ago

      and good luck with the inevitable v0.18.0 breakage!

      I lol’ed because you’re absolutely right, hopefully the UI elements don’t change too much under the hood with the update where OP doesn’t have to redo everything from scratch.

      • sintamo@beehaw.orgOPEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        Thank you! I played with lemmy.ml a bit since that’s been updated, and it looks like ~80% of what I did should still work. But it does reveal the issues with making these client-side changes

    • sintamo@beehaw.orgOPEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      I tried, but it’s either beyond the scope of CSS edits, or simply beyond my abilities haha. Maybe proper themes installed to the instance could make that possible though!

  • Nerd02@forum.basedcount.comEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    They look great, thanks for sharing! I’m “stealing” these for my instance, can’t wait to see the 0.18.0 implementation.

  • Whimseymimple@beehaw.orgEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    Beehaw Dark is exactly what I’ve been looking for as a starting place, and I can adjust minimal things here and there if I need to. Thanks for taking the time to make and share these with us!

    • sintamo@beehaw.orgOPEnglish
      3·
      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.orgEnglish
        1·
        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