This has some very nice features. I have to say I dislike some aspects of it aesthetically (which is not to say they’re bad; my preferences are not everyone’s preferences). I’ll list those, with the hope that a comment consisting almost entirely of negative feedback won’t be misunderstood as meaning I disapprove of, or dislike, GW as a whole.
The text on GW is rather large, while the text on LW2 is unusually small. I happen to prefer the latter. [I know this is an eccentricity of mine, and I would not be astonished (though I would be a bit surprised) if it turned out that despite my preference I read faster and take in more with the larger text. Most likely many people will prefer GW’s text sizes, and more will benefit from them despite not preferring them.]
The titles in the GW article list are (at least for me on my browser) very very bold in comparison with everything else. To me they look downright silly. [My guess is that unless this is the result of some oddity of my setup, many others will feel the same way.]
The margin between comment text and the borders around the comments on GW is smaller than on LW2, even though the text is much larger. I find it uncomfortably small; doubling it would not be too small an increase. [My guess is that almost everyone would find GW nicer to look at and easier to read with wider margins there.]
The green border on new comments is extremely prominent; I personally find it rather distracting and would prefer something subtler, or maybe applied only to the left border. [I don’t have a confident guess about how others will feel about this one.]
You know that there are six different themes to choose from, right? :)
(Top left, the six square buttons with ‘A’ in them)
Edit: And let me repeat here what I said over on LW1—I encourage anyone who finds the existing themes not to their liking (and has some CSS skills) to create a user style for GreaterWrong and submit it to userstyles.org. If we really like it, we’ll incorporate it into GW, as a selectable theme; and even if not, it’ll benefit other people, who may share your preferences!
Edit2: Echoing clone of saturn—feedback is definitely appreciated, thank you!
I had, in fact, not noticed that there were different themes. I’ve seen them now; thanks. (Super-brief comments, probably not actually useful: White on black, blecccch. Grey, better than default though I have no idea why article titles on the front page are red. Ultramodern, ultra-unreadable. Simple, also better than default in some ways but too simple—e.g., navigation stuff at top becomes a mess. Brutalist, ha ha very funny.)
If I have correctly understood how to use userstyles.org then some tweaks for the default GW style can be found there under the name “Greater Wrong tweakage”; my username there is gjm. I don’t make any claim that the result is Objectively Better than the current GW default; just that I like it better that way. (If I were making an actual GW theme, I would make the horizontal rule between comment meta and body be #eee in white comments and #ddd in grey ones. But I didn’t fancy writing the necessary cascades of .comment-item .comment-item .comment-item .comment-item...)
(It’s interesting to see the variations in people’s preferences for this sort of thing. For example, I’ve had multiple people tell me that they like the brutalist theme best (it’s certainly not a joke!); the dark theme was made as a response to someone’s specific request for one (and was greeted with enthusiasm); the design of the grey theme came from another user (though I refined it); etc. If ever there was a clear demonstration of why options and customizability are critical to a good user experience, it’s this!)
I’ll take a closer look at your user style in a bit, though let me say immediately that I definitely appreciate you making one (it’s gratifying when users take the effort to improve my work!).
Edit: I’ve tried out the style now. Not bad at all! It’s too small a change for it to make much sense providing it as a whole separate theme, but I definitely recommend it for anyone who agrees with your critique of the default appearance. Thanks again!
P.S. By the way, I think you’re right about the navigation in the simple theme being rather messy. That’s on my to-do list of things to correct.
A note about the .comment-item cascades—those are generated programmatically,
via PHP (search for “nested_stuff” in the script for the relevant bit). That script can be run by itself (it does not depend on anything else in the repository), e.g.:
php style.css.php > style.css
You can make the necessary tweaks to style.css.php, then extract the relevant bits of result from style.css. (Or, you know, not. I entirely understand if you don’t want to bother! Just noting the possibility.)
I made it. (Other than the grey theme—which, of course, is based on the modifications you posted—I made all the themes and did all of the design you currently see on the site.)
I am 100% unsurprised that preferences on these things vary :-). I do like light-on-dark in many contexts, but high-contrast light-on-dark using “ordinary” body-text typefaces always looks terrible to me (Bad Things, to my eyes, happen where the strokes are narrow). For e.g. monospaced typewriter-like text in text editors, light-on-dark works just fine for me. I mention all this not in order to try to provoke any changes; just musing, again, on how preferences vary. Incidentally, the green borders on new comments are super-duper-prominent in the light-on-dark theme; you might consider toning them down a bit.
I wasn’t expecting my tweaks to become an all-new GW theme (though I guess if there’s a sudden clamour from users who try them and love them, anything’s possible).
I don’t have PHP installed on anything convenient, and don’t think I will bother installing it just to make a small optimization to the appearance of my GW style.
I do like light-on-dark in many contexts, but high-contrast light-on-dark using “ordinary” body-text typefaces always looks terrible to me (Bad Things, to my eyes, happen where the strokes are narrow). For e.g. monospaced typewriter-like text in text editors, light-on-dark works just fine for me. I mention all this not in order to try to provoke any changes; just musing, again, on how preferences vary. Incidentally, the green borders on new comments are super-duper-prominent in the light-on-dark theme; you might consider toning them down a bit.
These are, actually, very valid concerns, and you’re not the only person to have mentioned this sort of thing. An upcoming feature will address all of this. Stay tuned! :)
Edit: By the way, I’ve found that differences in how people perceive, and react to, various combinations of font / color / etc., are often largely caused by differences in the device that a site is being viewed on. (I’ve already made several tweaks to the site’s design to account for users on different platforms, which seem to have helped some people, and am always open to doing more in that vein.) Do you mind saying what you’re using to browse GW? (I’m interested in both hardware—what kind of device, what size of screen, what resolution, etc.—and software—OS, browser, version.)
Right now I’m on a laptop with a wide-gamut 15″ 4K screen. So e.g. it generally copes very nicely with fine details in type, and it’s possible that colours may appear more saturated than they do on other devices. It’s running Windows 10 and I’m using a recent version of Firefox. The zoom factor in Windows, which on my machine defaults to 250%, is set to 200%, so many things will be displayed slightly smaller for me than is standard.
I have also tried GW on two other systems. One is running Windows 8.1 and, again, a recent version of Firefox, but with a lower-resolution monitor (30“, 2560x1600). The other is running a Unixy system (FreeBSD, as it happens) and a slightly older version of Firefox, and a 24” 1920x1200 monitor. Neither of these displays has a particularly wide colour gamut and I have made no attempt to calibrate them for colour accuracy.
All the displays are LCDs with a standard RGB stripe layout. I don’t think I have any nonstandard configuration to report besides what I mentioned above.
My impressions of GW are essentially the same on all of these. I have tried my tweaked styles only on the first and last (which are also the two most different) and prefer them to the defaults on both.
For users that aren’t satisfied with those and don’t mind speaking CSS, Stylish and similar browser extensions are an option. I picked up css customization mainly to add max-width to body text that does not have it, but it’s good for pretty much any case where you think a site designer’s choices were unwise.
Yes, to clarify, this is exactly what I was talking about—styles posted on userstyles.org (and marked appropriately as belonging to GreaterWrong) will become available to anyone who visits GW and has the Stylish browser extension installed.
Since January 2017, the Stylish browser extension has been spyware that transmits every single URL you visit to its corporate owners’ servers. Firefox has just blacklisted it; users of other browsers may want to disable it manually. I think there’s a config option that supposedly stops it sending all that information, if you trust its developers to implement that honestly.
Thank you for the comment; I’ll have to uninstall it from all my browsers. Do you know of any non-malicious alternatives (preferably ones that also work with userstyles.org)?
Apparently there’s a thing called Stylus, forked from an earlier version of Stylish. I expect it works with userstyles.org but haven’t checked.
I believe userstyles.org is owned by the same people who own Stylish; I haven’t looked into whether they do anything evil with it, or whether they could if they wanted to.
This has some very nice features. I have to say I dislike some aspects of it aesthetically (which is not to say they’re bad; my preferences are not everyone’s preferences). I’ll list those, with the hope that a comment consisting almost entirely of negative feedback won’t be misunderstood as meaning I disapprove of, or dislike, GW as a whole.
The text on GW is rather large, while the text on LW2 is unusually small. I happen to prefer the latter. [I know this is an eccentricity of mine, and I would not be astonished (though I would be a bit surprised) if it turned out that despite my preference I read faster and take in more with the larger text. Most likely many people will prefer GW’s text sizes, and more will benefit from them despite not preferring them.]
The titles in the GW article list are (at least for me on my browser) very very bold in comparison with everything else. To me they look downright silly. [My guess is that unless this is the result of some oddity of my setup, many others will feel the same way.]
The margin between comment text and the borders around the comments on GW is smaller than on LW2, even though the text is much larger. I find it uncomfortably small; doubling it would not be too small an increase. [My guess is that almost everyone would find GW nicer to look at and easier to read with wider margins there.]
The green border on new comments is extremely prominent; I personally find it rather distracting and would prefer something subtler, or maybe applied only to the left border. [I don’t have a confident guess about how others will feel about this one.]
I definitely appreciate this kind of detailed feedback, positive or negative. Thanks for taking the time to write it up.
You know that there are six different themes to choose from, right? :)
(Top left, the six square buttons with ‘A’ in them)
Edit: And let me repeat here what I said over on LW1—I encourage anyone who finds the existing themes not to their liking (and has some CSS skills) to create a user style for GreaterWrong and submit it to userstyles.org. If we really like it, we’ll incorporate it into GW, as a selectable theme; and even if not, it’ll benefit other people, who may share your preferences!
Edit2: Echoing clone of saturn—feedback is definitely appreciated, thank you!
I had, in fact, not noticed that there were different themes. I’ve seen them now; thanks. (Super-brief comments, probably not actually useful: White on black, blecccch. Grey, better than default though I have no idea why article titles on the front page are red. Ultramodern, ultra-unreadable. Simple, also better than default in some ways but too simple—e.g., navigation stuff at top becomes a mess. Brutalist, ha ha very funny.)
If I have correctly understood how to use userstyles.org then some tweaks for the default GW style can be found there under the name “Greater Wrong tweakage”; my username there is gjm. I don’t make any claim that the result is Objectively Better than the current GW default; just that I like it better that way. (If I were making an actual GW theme, I would make the horizontal rule between comment meta and body be #eee in white comments and #ddd in grey ones. But I didn’t fancy writing the necessary cascades of .comment-item .comment-item .comment-item .comment-item...)
You’re quite welcome!
(It’s interesting to see the variations in people’s preferences for this sort of thing. For example, I’ve had multiple people tell me that they like the brutalist theme best (it’s certainly not a joke!); the dark theme was made as a response to someone’s specific request for one (and was greeted with enthusiasm); the design of the grey theme came from another user (though I refined it); etc. If ever there was a clear demonstration of why options and customizability are critical to a good user experience, it’s this!)
I’ll take a closer look at your user style in a bit, though let me say immediately that I definitely appreciate you making one (it’s gratifying when users take the effort to improve my work!).
Edit: I’ve tried out the style now. Not bad at all! It’s too small a change for it to make much sense providing it as a whole separate theme, but I definitely recommend it for anyone who agrees with your critique of the default appearance. Thanks again!
P.S. By the way, I think you’re right about the navigation in the simple theme being rather messy. That’s on my to-do list of things to correct.
A note about the .comment-item cascades—those are generated programmatically, via PHP (search for “nested_stuff” in the script for the relevant bit). That script can be run by itself (it does not depend on anything else in the repository), e.g.:
You can make the necessary tweaks to
style.css.php, then extract the relevant bits of result fromstyle.css. (Or, you know, not. I entirely understand if you don’t want to bother! Just noting the possibility.)When the brutalist theme appeared, I instantly switched to it and haven’t looked back. Really curious to know who made it.
I made it. (Other than the grey theme—which, of course, is based on the modifications you posted—I made all the themes and did all of the design you currently see on the site.)
I didn’t think I’d say this, but the brutalist theme is in fact pretty good!
I don’t like the font personally (which I imagine is the point for many).
I really just like how clean it looks.
I am 100% unsurprised that preferences on these things vary :-). I do like light-on-dark in many contexts, but high-contrast light-on-dark using “ordinary” body-text typefaces always looks terrible to me (Bad Things, to my eyes, happen where the strokes are narrow). For e.g. monospaced typewriter-like text in text editors, light-on-dark works just fine for me. I mention all this not in order to try to provoke any changes; just musing, again, on how preferences vary. Incidentally, the green borders on new comments are super-duper-prominent in the light-on-dark theme; you might consider toning them down a bit.
I wasn’t expecting my tweaks to become an all-new GW theme (though I guess if there’s a sudden clamour from users who try them and love them, anything’s possible).
I don’t have PHP installed on anything convenient, and don’t think I will bother installing it just to make a small optimization to the appearance of my GW style.
Update: see this comment—there’s a new feature that should address some of your concerns!
These are, actually, very valid concerns, and you’re not the only person to have mentioned this sort of thing. An upcoming feature will address all of this. Stay tuned! :)
Edit: By the way, I’ve found that differences in how people perceive, and react to, various combinations of font / color / etc., are often largely caused by differences in the device that a site is being viewed on. (I’ve already made several tweaks to the site’s design to account for users on different platforms, which seem to have helped some people, and am always open to doing more in that vein.) Do you mind saying what you’re using to browse GW? (I’m interested in both hardware—what kind of device, what size of screen, what resolution, etc.—and software—OS, browser, version.)
Yeah, agreed, that can make a big difference.
Right now I’m on a laptop with a wide-gamut 15″ 4K screen. So e.g. it generally copes very nicely with fine details in type, and it’s possible that colours may appear more saturated than they do on other devices. It’s running Windows 10 and I’m using a recent version of Firefox. The zoom factor in Windows, which on my machine defaults to 250%, is set to 200%, so many things will be displayed slightly smaller for me than is standard.
I have also tried GW on two other systems. One is running Windows 8.1 and, again, a recent version of Firefox, but with a lower-resolution monitor (30“, 2560x1600). The other is running a Unixy system (FreeBSD, as it happens) and a slightly older version of Firefox, and a 24” 1920x1200 monitor. Neither of these displays has a particularly wide colour gamut and I have made no attempt to calibrate them for colour accuracy.
All the displays are LCDs with a standard RGB stripe layout. I don’t think I have any nonstandard configuration to report besides what I mentioned above.
My impressions of GW are essentially the same on all of these. I have tried my tweaked styles only on the first and last (which are also the two most different) and prefer them to the defaults on both.
Excellent, thanks for the detailed report—it’s much appreciated.
For users that aren’t satisfied with those and don’t mind speaking CSS, Stylish and similar browser extensions are an option. I picked up css customization mainly to add max-width to body text that does not have it, but it’s good for pretty much any case where you think a site designer’s choices were unwise.
Yes, to clarify, this is exactly what I was talking about—styles posted on userstyles.org (and marked appropriately as belonging to GreaterWrong) will become available to anyone who visits GW and has the Stylish browser extension installed.
Since January 2017, the Stylish browser extension has been spyware that transmits every single URL you visit to its corporate owners’ servers. Firefox has just blacklisted it; users of other browsers may want to disable it manually. I think there’s a config option that supposedly stops it sending all that information, if you trust its developers to implement that honestly.
Oh… I didn’t know that. :(
Thank you for the comment; I’ll have to uninstall it from all my browsers. Do you know of any non-malicious alternatives (preferably ones that also work with userstyles.org)?
Apparently there’s a thing called Stylus, forked from an earlier version of Stylish. I expect it works with userstyles.org but haven’t checked.
I believe userstyles.org is owned by the same people who own Stylish; I haven’t looked into whether they do anything evil with it, or whether they could if they wanted to.
I don’t think that edit was present when I composed, but thanks.