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EDIT 05 July

Thanks for your feedback! As the community requested, here are a few changes:

The vote icons

Goal: de-emphasize the regular vote icons (right now they look active even though they're not).

Vote icon Vote icon active

The questions color

Goal: Make them less bright.

Question color

The site icon & favicon

Goal: Since using the full logo doesn't work, create another one that works better at small sizes.

Favicon

All these changes will be live after our next production build.

As you can see the new design just went live. Congratulations! Thank you for your valuable design feedback.

We have also themed the twitter account and newsletter template for this site, and adjusted the privilege levels to higher thresholds.

If you see any CSS/styling bugs, please start a new post and tag it with design and bug.

Congrats again and thank you for being an awesome community!

Oh! And by the way, we have also updated your Chat theme!

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    $\begingroup$ Great logo! Is it just me or do all the (blue) vote up/down buttons on the main site look like they're already selected? The selected dark blue looks possibly more muted and more unselected than the unselected bright blue. $\endgroup$
    – user56reinstatemonica8
    Commented Jul 1, 2016 at 15:59
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    $\begingroup$ @user568458 That was my first thought as well when I viewed my first question with the new design... $\endgroup$
    – Lnafziger
    Commented Jul 1, 2016 at 16:23
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    $\begingroup$ While I agree with the answer below about a couple elements, it's a great design overall. Great work and thanks! $\endgroup$
    – Todd Wilcox
    Commented Jul 1, 2016 at 16:27
  • $\begingroup$ Love it! I've been checking back to see if we got a design yet since we (finally) got out of beta. $\endgroup$
    – Canuk
    Commented Jul 2, 2016 at 4:56
  • $\begingroup$ Loving the new background and logo! $\endgroup$
    – Dawn Breaker
    Commented Jul 2, 2016 at 7:59
  • $\begingroup$ @user568458 It's not just you. Most people seem to be confused by the colour scheme. $\endgroup$
    – 200_success
    Commented Jul 2, 2016 at 20:14
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    $\begingroup$ Great work Stéphane, thank you for taking the feedback of the community into account! $\endgroup$
    – DeltaLima Mod
    Commented Jul 5, 2016 at 9:35
  • $\begingroup$ Is it just me, or are those link blues just terribly bright? $\endgroup$
    – Williham Totland
    Commented Jul 5, 2016 at 18:11
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    $\begingroup$ Huge steps in the right direction Stephane, thank you so much. My next (I know, I'm horrible) nitpick would be that it would be nice if all the tags were a different color from the title's of the questions... $\endgroup$
    – Jae Carr
    Commented Jul 5, 2016 at 19:06
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    $\begingroup$ @JayCarr Done! :) $\endgroup$
    – Stéphane
    Commented Jul 6, 2016 at 7:50
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    $\begingroup$ Yay! Thank you so much! $\endgroup$
    – Jae Carr
    Commented Jul 6, 2016 at 14:19
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    $\begingroup$ I want to replace my complaint of 1 July with a compliment on the changes made on 5 July. It looks a lot better overall now. Thanks! $\endgroup$
    – Todd Wilcox
    Commented Jul 6, 2016 at 18:00

6 Answers 6

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Please see the post update.

Great, thanks for putting up the new design and the effort required to achieve it.

Two nitpicks:

  1. The recent votes appear like this:
    Recent Votes

    This appear like a red mustache (my imagination runs wild, sometimes).

  2. Your votes don't stand out. As shown here:
    Votes on Post Votes on Post

    Unless you have seen the two (which many will), you may not immediately get an idea whether you had voted on this or not.

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    $\begingroup$ I agree about the vote up/down buttons. Not sure I agree about the red moustache :-). Maybe make the unselected buttons white with blue outlines so they match the tags? $\endgroup$
    – user56reinstatemonica8
    Commented Jul 1, 2016 at 16:01
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    $\begingroup$ I agree about the mustache. I think the scaling down of the logo might require the proportions to be changed to make it look right - which is a thing that happens often with logos and icons. Also on my monitor the brighter blue is pretty aggressive and does seem more like the "selected" color rather than a default color. $\endgroup$
    – Todd Wilcox
    Commented Jul 1, 2016 at 16:26
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    $\begingroup$ The vote buttons definitely need to be changed. My first reaction on seeing a question in the new site design was "I've voted the same question up and down? How did that happen?" And, late in the game (I missed the thread asking for comments before the design went live), I really don't like the moustache. Especially in the HNQ list, it just doesn't say "aviation" at all: when I saw the old picture of a plane, I intuitively knew which site the question was on; when I see the moustache, I only know that it's Aviation as a learned response. It's not intuitive at all. $\endgroup$
    – David Richerby
    Commented Jul 2, 2016 at 10:41
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    $\begingroup$ Having said that, the overall design looks great (e.g., on the site's front page). At full size, the "moustache" is an excellent logo. $\endgroup$
    – David Richerby
    Commented Jul 2, 2016 at 10:43
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    $\begingroup$ I had the same reaction as @DavidRicherby upon seeing the vote buttons; the bright colors scream "highlighted." I'm pretty sure there are sites around the network where (almost) that exact color indicates the vote. $\endgroup$
    – Kevin
    Commented Jul 2, 2016 at 17:55
  • $\begingroup$ The moustache is also the icon on the hot network questions list. I dunno what it looks like, but it's definitely not an airplane or a wings pin at that size. $\endgroup$
    – E.P.
    Commented Jul 2, 2016 at 22:29
  • $\begingroup$ Why not use a light green for up-vote, and light red for down vote. $\endgroup$
    – Firee
    Commented Jul 3, 2016 at 6:08
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    $\begingroup$ Even worse, the unused vote buttons stand out visually more than the used ones. On most other SE sites it's the opposite -- now I have several times found myself wondering, "hmm, why on earth did I downvote that answer, it seems perfectly fine", only to discover that I actually upvoted. But it was the downvote button that "lit up". $\endgroup$
    – hmakholm left over Monica
    Commented Jul 4, 2016 at 10:04
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The icon's shape in hot questions list doesn't look very distinct. Perhaps you could add those transparent lines to it? They're used in favicon which is smaller, so why not there too?

Compare:

old

With lines:

new

Update Icon was changed and now looks like this:

I'm not a professional designer but I gotta say there are noticeable differences between each site's icon's presence because of their size and colors. This one might be the most prominent, along with ELL's red banner/bookmark.

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Following up with the issue about the FavIcon not being recognizable enough (and even looking like a "Chinese Character", I'm attaching my re-interpretation of it for consideration:

FavIcon-AttitudeIndicator

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Please see the post update.

The blue text, IMO, is far too bright

The up/downvote buttons are downright confusing - the selected button shouldn't be duller than the un-selected one!

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Not sure if it will work, but how about making the sky part in the icon less opaque? Hopefully it will look a little less like piecharts.stackexchange.com that way.

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I may be a little picky, but the favicon looks like a Chinese word character especially with the red background. And looking in the "Hot Questions" list, the favicon seriously looks like some Asian thing.

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  • $\begingroup$ I'm sorry but I don't understand... "the new tab icon" ? $\endgroup$
    – Stéphane
    Commented Jul 5, 2016 at 12:28
  • $\begingroup$ @Stéphane That would be the site icon. $\endgroup$
    – SMS von der Tann
    Commented Jul 5, 2016 at 12:34
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    $\begingroup$ @Stéphane The favicon. $\endgroup$
    – reirab
    Commented Jul 5, 2016 at 15:45
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    $\begingroup$ Yeah I don't like it either. It doesn't mean "aviation" to me in the same way the old plane icon did. $\endgroup$
    – Pyritie
    Commented Jul 6, 2016 at 10:12
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    $\begingroup$ Yeah, the new favicon is really horrible. $\endgroup$
    – AndrejaKo
    Commented Jul 6, 2016 at 11:11
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    $\begingroup$ I'd suggest making the favicon blue in the "sky" and brown on the "ground". To me, that colorization would strongly indicate an attitude indicator. $\endgroup$
    – abelenky
    Commented Jul 6, 2016 at 20:55

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