Edit: I posted the first release of my theme based on the ideas in this post here!
Hi everyone!
I’m an Industrial/Product Designer in my professional life, and I was so inspired by @UrLogicFails’s fantastic new community icons that I wanted to try out some of my own design ideas for Beehaw.
First, I tried my hand at an icon for Beehaw. I’m endeared to the little pixelated bee-cowboy we have now, but my background is in cleaner, more minimal designs that are easy to deploy to lots of different devices. A good logo sets a good first impression, and I want new users to see Beehaw as a real, legitimate alternative vision for social media. I’ve tried to recreate the back of a bee, and used the wings to form a subtle letter “B.” My personal favorite is the hexagon bestagon, but I have both iOS and Android variations. Icon design is always really contentious, but it’s also really fun - I’d love to see other people’s ideas!
Second, I took a stab at tweaking the design of Beehaw, with the goals improving the layout and padding, introducing a more consistent color scheme, increasing legibility, and (of course) incorporating more bee elements. I’m working on a CSS theme that incorporates some of these changes, but others are beyond the scope of CSS injections and will require actual work on Lemmy-UI.
Light Theme:
Dark Theme:
I’d love to hear your thoughts, and I’m happy to share more if people are interested :)
Thanks for viewing, take care!
Hey there. This is beautiful work!
I can’t speak for all the other admins but I have strong opinions on the logo. To me, the logo needs to be both bee and haw and I don’t want it to feel watered down or presented in a way to be appealing to all the masses. To me it’s meant to be cute, radical, and kinda in your face with it’s absurdity. I don’t think it can be done in such an abstract way without losing too much character. But that’s just my 2c.
The themes are quite clean, however, which is definitely what I think we need to reduce visual clutter and make things easy to find. Thank you so much for putting this all together, it’s great work!
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Love this feedback, thank you! It’s a really interesting exercise, trying to make something that isn’t professional - I’ve worked so long in our modern “clean and simple” landscape that it’s tough to remember when I was younger, and things were more wholesome, simple, and authentic. I agree, for a site that is by definition “alternative,” these logos are a bit too corporate looking. Glad you like the theme though!
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Just to pile on with everyone else, but I really love the themes, especially the dark one!
I just released a theme based on this post if you’d like to try it!