We’re excited to introduce our newest theme — Horizon! We’ve been testing Horizon internally for some time and are now ready to test here on Meta so we can get your feedback on how to continue improving this theme.
In this topic, we’ll share the goals behind Horizon and provide guidance for how to test and share your feedback with us.
Getting to know Horizon
Horizon is a simple, beautiful theme that aspires to become the new out-of-the-box experience for Discourse sites.
Please note that Horizon is still considered an experimental theme! As such, before installing it on your community or providing feedback, please read the rest of this topic so you’ll understand what to expect from this theme and how to best provide feedback to us.
Who is Horizon for?
While we hope that Horizon is a great fit for many communities, we created Horizon with specific users in mind — non-technical admins and everyday members.
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Non-technical admins are community admins who have limited technical expertise and no access to design or development resources. They don’t have the resources or know-how to customize Discourse’s appearance to work best for their community, but still believe that Discourse is a great fit for their community.
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Everyday members fall somewhere in between the one-time visitor and the elite power user. They regularly read and post in the community, and are more likely to visit Discourse primarily (if not exclusively) from their phones.
We are proud that Discourse is so flexible and customizable, we want to make sure Discourse remains a great option for all communities, regardless of technical expertise or resources. We created Horizon for admins that don’t have access to design or developer resources, but still want a great looking community that your members will love.
What’s different about Horizon?
While our Default theme is a relatively blank slate, Horizon is an opinionated theme. That means we have made certain choices about how Discourse looks and operates while using this theme in order to provide a great overall user experience for our target users (described above). Here are some changes you might notice:
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Topic cards are less information dense. The most noticeable feature of Horizon is the topic card. We have pruned out as much information as we can to keep the topic list looking clean and approachable. Certain information, like a more robust list of topic participants and topic tags, are not visible on the topic card.
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Horizon is not intended to support additional customizations. Because we’re targeting an audience that isn’t able or interested in customizing Discourse’s appearance or behavior, Horizon is not guaranteed to work well with all theme components or customizations.
That said, we’ve tested Horizon against the most popular theme components and the incompatibilities we’ve found so far are minor. We’ll work to address those over time. For now, we do not recommend activating theme components with Horizon or adding your own customizations.
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Horizon includes new color palettes that admins can enable to give members greater control over their community experience. Once enabled through the admin Color Palette settings, members can select from one of six theme-specific color palettes for a custom look and feel.
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Larger text in the reading area. You’ll notice that Horizon’s reading area (i.e. topics) has slightly larger text than the rest of the interface text. We’re experimenting with this differentiated text size with the hope that it makes topics easier to read, while keeping less important text — like sidebar links — more minimal and less distracting.
Testing and sharing your feedback
You can check out Horizon on Meta using the theme switcher in the bottom of your sidebar:
As you test here on Meta or in your own community, you may run into issues with the visual design or incompatibilities with certain theme components or customizations. When that happens, please let us know. Your feedback will help us improve Horizon so that we can begin making it available more broadly.
Please note that we may not address all feedback that we receive at this time. That doesn’t mean your feedback is invalid or invaluable — it just means we want to continue to test a certain idea or design decision to better understand how it serves the needs of our target users.
Known issues / work in progress areas
Here are a few areas where we’re actively working:
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Improving the topic timeline design. Right now it’s a little wide, we’d like to make it more subtle so it takes up less visual space and demands less attention.
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Identifying areas where layouts and styles aren’t applying correctly. The invite screens are one area where there are minor visual discrepancies. We’ve made a lot of these fixes already, but please keep letting us know as you find areas where things don’t look quite right.
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Touching up color palettes to ensure accessibility. Horizon has a more streamlined color system (and has inspired some new color palettes, e.g. Lily, Clover, Royal, Marigold, etc.). We’re working on making sure Horizon is accessible and has the proper contrast in light and dark modes.
