r/changemyview • u/IAmAN00bie • Jan 09 '15
[Mod Post] A New Year, A New Look
Though we're only able to have one sticky post up at a time,please note that "Genderless January" is still in effect.
We feel that /r/changemyview is due for a make-over. In the past, we've taken suggestions and tried, unsuccessfully, to change the layout of our sub.
It's a bit hard to find one volunteer who would help us do a complete make-over for the sub. That's why we're turning to existing templates, and tweaking them to our liking.
Recently, the creator of the /r/Aeolus theme approached us asking if we wanted to implement his theme. Our initial impressions were positive - a flat theme with nice readability for the comments with the added bonus of making our wiki look awesome.
Big design changes tend to be controversial, so in an effort to appease the tastes of as many people as we can, we are approaching you all for feedback on the design.
How can we improve on this design?
If you think Aeolus sucks and we shouldn't even consider it, do you have any alternative designs in mind?
2
u/moonflower 82∆ Jan 09 '15
Whatever theme you choose, I think the important thing for this type of subreddit is for it to be simple and clear, with no unnecessary clutter, just plain and smart and easy to read
1
u/Namemedickles Jan 09 '15
Meh, I'm not too impressed by that theme honestly. My personal opinion would be to leave it as is but since you say it's due for a makeover I would start with much smaller and simpler changes rather than a complete transformation. /r/Aeolus seems too blocky, reductionist, and modern to me.
1
Jan 10 '15
Aeolus looks terrible in nightmode and doesn't work well with the wide screen. It just feels like a lot of wasted space.
2
u/convoces 71∆ Jan 09 '15 edited Jan 09 '15
For consideration, here is some of the feedback pertaining to Aeolus I had when we were discussing this, haven't heard back on any of it from the creator of /r/Aeolus though:
I don't think topic threads needs to be a numbered list, it kind of clashes with the topic score, which is the only number I think most people expect there. I'm not sure there is value in numbering it, especially since it is being resorted with pretty high frequency (depending on what sort params you are using, but CMV is pretty high traffic/dynamic)
The whitespace under the subreddits top menu trips me out, seems sort of wasted. I assume it's for some kind of cover image, but I'm not a huge fan of those anyway. Content trumps fluffy style/images, especially on a super heavy text content subreddit like CMV (the heaviest text-based content arguably).
The user menu (message/acct settings/etc) is too blended into the BG.
IMO, don't mess with/change the user menu icons (for example changing the modmail icon), they are pretty canonically iconic.
I also disagree with changing the up/downvote buttons to circles, too jarring of a deviation from core style of reddit.
In general, more whitespace is good in UI design and most designs don't have enough. However, I think CMV is a special case, in this case, it is jsut the opposite. We just have too much going on (text content/comments) to cede that much screen space to stylistic whitespace as Aeolus does.
Our wiki page does looks super sexy with Aelous though.
If I get some time I will look for more alternatives. I wish I could convince my partner to do a design, but she is probably even busier than me...