[Webinar] Ask Discourse Anything: Designer Edition

Announcements
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On 2024-10-30T04:00:00Z, two of our designers, Jordan and Kris, walked us through how the Discourse design team is set up and shared tips for creating custom community designs.

Replay

Design Team Structure at a Glance

  • Jordan is our Design Team Lead
  • The design team has two branches:
    • Customer Projects (Bryce and Ty), handling client requests and customizations.
    • Discourse Core Internal Team (Charlie, Ella, Kris, and Meghna), focusing on features within Discourse itself.

Customization Highlights

Top Questions

Starting with Community Design on Discourse

Begin simple: Understand Discourse’s functionality and define goals for your community. Utilize branding elements (like color schemes and header links) and consider available components before diving into deep customization.

Difference Between Themes and Theme Components

A theme adjusts the overall look and feel, while theme components are individual custom elements (like header links or search banners) that can be added to any theme.

Steps from Basic to Highly Customized Design

Basic setups can use existing components and themes, while advanced customizations may need developer involvement for deeper changes. Discourse Meta offers a variety of theme components for easier, ready-made customization.

Using Plugins and Components Effectively

Plugins allow back-end modifications but can impact performance, so they’re best for larger setups. Theme components are ideal for front-end changes, accessible through Meta for easy installation and maintenance.

Figma Resources and Style Guide Availability

While the team uses some Figma components internally, there isn’t a full library due to the broad customization possible on Discourse. However, a built-in style guide within Discourse offers a solid starting point for custom layouts.

Key Tools & Resources

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Hi there, will this be recorded? It’s just after midnight for me.

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Yup, we always record these sessions.

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Great to hear you will be talking about design and Discourse!

Unfortunately, I will also not be able to join live, so if up-front questions are okay, and if it’s not too much for the scope of this session, it would be great to learn more about how the Discourse design team conceptualizes the general Discourse UX, especially for the main page, and how things might evolve in the future (sidebar, filter elements in the main content header, personal menu, notifications, etc.).

My impression is that currently due to the way things evolved over time, there’s a bit of overlap between different elements (e.g. category filter in side bar and in content header, or personal message in side bar and in personal menu), and I struggle to build clear mental models of the different building blocks of the page [1]. But it’s also perfectly possible that the Discourse design team approaches this topic with a different lens than me.

  1. I really should do a longer post on this ↩︎

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Great question! We’ll be sure to include some info around this when the replay is posted. (I’ll be updating the OP with a week.)

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Replay and recap will be posted early next week!

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Sorry to bother you, but is there any news on the recap? Would be great to be able to watch it over the weekend.

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Refresh! I just updated the OP. :smiley:

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Excellent! Thanks a lot!

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