A progression from April 2013 to December 2013:
The authentic undesigned look
These few designs have no alignment/rhythm but have typical-blue links. Reminds me of reddit and all the old community sites.
I bet people feel more comfortable posting on a site like this. It looks like a dive where you don’t fear spilling a beer:
The next few are just atrocious, but I’m trying to find an alternative to up vs down. I still haven’t made up my mind on whether down-votes should even be allowed.
Blowing up the type
A few months later I try to kick it up a notch with a more modern flair:
Edit: The followers thing seems like a great alternative to voting: Voting is a drive-by, following is a commitment. Having 10 people following the status of a bug may mean more than having 100 people upvote a bug (and then never read about it again). I’m still torn about this (12/10/2013)
Some things look good individually:
But painful in a group:
Uniform widths can seem too repetitive:
Variable widths allow you to easily discern one tag from another (feature request is wider than a bug-report). And the ironically-modern colors (old school desaturated) make it a little less gaudy:
Bolder
The colors below are bolder, but still nice tints. Placing tags at the end of bug-titles hides the repetitiveness even more:
November 2013:
Switched to a more common design (Twitter, Gitlab, GitHub, most modern dashboard/webapps seem to opt for a contrasting wide top-nav):
Expanded the negative-space to make the page seem bigger and less constrained.
Minimalist and type-centric
December 2013:
Ditched the wide side-nav for a concise top-nav. Kind of torn between this and the one above.
Tweaked fonts to make everything look more uniform: small fonts are bigger, more vertical column alignments, stronger vertical rhythm (24px line-height, generous 15 or 16px base-font)
