Over the past few hours, I’ve noticed the Meta Branded theme having some cjangss, like an increased border radius on buttons and text fields, etc.
Over the past 15 something minutes, I noticed that the primary color changed from blue to purple. Was there a reason for this change, like to align it with the ‘new’ discourse.org design? It was blue for years now, so the change to purple came as a surprise.
Couldn’t see that on mobile but after changing my browser to show the mobile view I do now. It’s the same one used on the main site, I believe. But yes, I’m not a big fan of it either. On the flip side, the colour is easy to adjust to, it’s not too bright or loud.
I personally love the updated colors and font, but understand they might feel quite different at first. They’re part of the new brand guidelines we’re implementing across the site, so they aren’t open for changes.
That said, I really appreciate you taking the time to share your feedback on the theme. As @Moin mentioned, this update is part of a sequence of planned changes. We might not be able to fix every glitch in the current theme, but all input is super valuable and will help guide other improvements to come!
I don’t understand what you mean, it looks perfectly fine to me:
Sorry, that was just a pun. I do have slight issues with chromatic aberrations as well in certain conditions, but I don’t have any with the purple choice on the new meta branded theme.
I also like the background hue in both dark and light theme.
I’m not a fan of the fully rounded buttons. It’s okay-ish for wide buttons, but the fully round buttons
Can explain why tho. Perhaps it gives me a smartphone vibe
Perhaps I just have to get used to it, but I usually don’t pick the meta branded theme, I like being on default.
Anyway, happy to see all these changes. While everything can’t please everyone, changes must go through many iterations to get closer to perfection after all .
And I also like the new discourse.org theme, by the way. Keep up the good work!
I think what happens here is that you have Amber selected as your personal dark color scheme.
Some themes, like this brand theme, are not color scheme agnostic, it doesn’t make sense to apply a different color scheme to them. However, there’s no option right now to disable user color schemes for a specific theme.
So far I only explicitly declared accent color values right on the theme, so they don’t come from the color scheme. But with Amber, I guess grey background values are mixed into that. A hotfix would be to manually declare all color variables on the theme and not infer any from the color scheme at all.
My general preference would be an option to disable custom color schemes on specific themes, like brand ones.
The goal is to not allow any other color schemes with this branded theme. We only want the brand colors for the overall look and because other colors won’t work with the theme, e.g. with the background gradient and blurred icons.
On a forum that only offers a brand look we don’t run into this issue because we can just not offer any other color schemes. But we have a conflict here, because we offer many schemes, but as far as I’m aware we don’t have the option to then disable that option selectively and force a color scheme with a theme.
As mentioned a hack is to entirely circumvent the color scheme system and declare all variables on the theme. I’ve done that just for tertiary values so far. It’s a bit of an ugly approach..
We now have a much clearer and more defined brand language. Creating a theme that fully embodies this language while remaining flexible enough to work across different color schemes is definitely challenging.
But seeing the variety of use cases and preferences you’ve shared already is extremely valuable. It really helps to draft the next iteration with a better understanding of how to balance brand consistency with flexibility.
I definitely like the solid background over the abstract circles of before. Feels less in your face then the horizon theme. When the theme initially loaded I was like “wait, the search banner isn’t too bad” but then the custom font loaded and yeah not good. That’s my main criticism at the moment, just give that more of a normal font and it looks good.
I do kinda wonder why purple is being overridden to be the accent color no matter what, I kinda like the blue of the WCAGdark theme..