To add to this, it seems that in a few places the contrast is quite low and the text is harder to read, but I haven’t measured to know if it would actually fail guidelines. Things sometimes feel too ‘soft’ and ‘fuzzy’, It is likely a combination of low contrast, text size, and text style.
Homepage → profile: background and foreground colouring both change.
Profile → book: boxed to floating, and the foreground box colour vanishes.
In each of them we can also see that the text style and colours are changing.
This feels a little like I’m looking at 3 different website designs.
None of this will prevent me from using the site though, so take it with a handful of salt.
Yeah, getting good contrast is definitely harder with the lighter colors. I’m sure it’ll steadily get better. It’s always hard after a big redesign since things will fall through the cracks. But work out the subtle color and contrast issues here and there, make the design more consistent from one page to another, and then I’m sure it’ll be fine.
For what it’s worth, I personally prefer dark themes with dark and light greys (white on black is terrible). For example, I really like the dark theme on the WaniKani forums. And the AniList pictures I posted earlier are actually a custom theme (based on a theme they changed a while ago) which I think has really good contrast.
@chrisosaurus that’s really amazing feedback thank you. I agree with you about the contrast and i’ll be continuing to work on that. A lot of these things are just me not executing the design very well
With regards to the ‘different sites’, I see what you mean to a certain extent. I’ll think about how i’m using that darker background vs not darker background. To be clear, the profile page has not been updated, so that will be brought more inline with the rest of the site soon. However, you are right even among the updated pages there could be better, more consistent styling.
Really though, I’m not expecting to get to a super level of design… just something nice that looks professional, which I think we’re getting to. The contrast definitely needs to be worked on a bit though.
Yeah I know that’s trendy and I’d love to offer a dark theme as an alternate, but I think it’s not a great choice as a primary for a text heavy site. At least, that’s my perspective, but I know a lot of others agree with you!
Has nothing to do with “trendy”. I tend to use my computer/phone in low light environments, so it’s much easier on my eyes. I agree about a dark theme not being the primary though. Hopefully one day you’ll be able to offer it as an alterantive.
Haha sorry didn’t intend that to sound flippant. No of course, I like dark themes too for a lot of things. Makes sense. I was intending to add it soon, but I may be burned out on design updates for a little while
Thanks @conan! I do plan to add more languages in the future, but I haven’t decided which ones yet. Once I add a second language, it’ll be much easier to add the 3rd/4th/5th as I’ll have the basic tools set up for toggling between languages on the site. However, it will always be somewhat time intensive to add a new language, so I plan to focus on Japanese and (later) Korean for the foreseeable future.
I have to create a really great site and community for Japanese & Korean before I can think too much about other languages. There’s still lots to do
I just noticed this as well. For a second I thought someone gave a book 5/5 (it was actually 4/5) because I couldn’t see the blank star. This definitely needs more contrast.
@sweetbeems I just noticed that the sub-ratings already have better contrast for the empty stars. Can you just make the main rating look the same?
I’m actually in the process of redesigning the book pages a bit to be more inline with the dashboard (darker background, lighter blocks). You’re right, standardizing the styles a bit more was the right call and was causing issues for the redesign of the profiles. Thanks @seanblue & @chrisosaurus for the feedback!
I can switch those stars over for the time being…but those gray backgrounds will be switching to the lighter beige… which will help things. I still think i’ll probably put a darker outlines on those blank stars to increase contrast still… they really do disappear.
Oh wow, I had no idea there was an ‘autocomplete’ attribute for inputs, which toggles off browser suggestions! For some reason, I don’t get those on Natively, not sure why… perhaps I have different browser settings than you. Thanks, for the pointer!
Do keep in mind that Chromium browsers often ignore autocomplete="off" because Google ignores the spec. Basically, Google thinks developers are too stupid to know when to set autocomplete on and off, so they run some fancy algorithm that does more harm than good. Sometimes using a (technically invalid) value instead of “off” does the trick, like autocomplete="natively", but you might as well start with “off” until/unless people start to complain.
1) Chromium had about three week period for me this month where dragging a tab would cause it to open a new window. (Very annoying.) Then one day it stopped doing that, being back to normal behavior. Was it due to a Chromium update? Was it due to an extension? Was it completely unrelated? I’ll never know…
2) As a software developer, I’ve broken plenty of things that were working just fine… (Many apologies to my co-workers who rely on these applications.)
It would be cool if we could sort by book length / number of pages on the library page. Sometimes I’m curious what the longest books I’ve read are and there’s no easy way to find out.
By the way, currently all of the sort options on the library page have an ascending and descending version. You may want to split out ascending/descending into a separate dropdown / serial button so the current dropdown doesn’t get too overwhelming as more options are added.
And while on the topic of book length, I think it could be useful on the search page as well, but maybe as a filter instead of a sort. I can imagine some people may only be interested in reading shorter books, so some kind of page range filter may be helpful.
On the topic of wants - maybe I’m just blind and can’t find it but can I undo a rating/change a comparison? If not, can I ask for that feature? I believe I underrated さんかく窓 - for the moment I’ve just left a comment on my review, but being able to go back and fix my ratings would be nice.
I tend to use my computer/phone in low light environments, so it’s much easier on my eyes. I agree about a dark theme not being the primary though. Hopefully one day you’ll be able to offer it as an alterantive.
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