I’ve heard many people saying that the front-end looks old and needs more work, but I’ve never heard someone describe how it could look better. To me, it looks perfectly fine. I wish it had a card layout similar to libreddit, but aside from that, I think it’s nice. If people want a completely different look, then there’s lemmyBB, and there will probably be other front-ends in the future. However, we should hear opinions about which styles people want.
I don’t think “old” is a bad thing. Mostly, it’s just kinda rough around the edges.
The menus could look more … “menuy”. Like when you open the main menu from the hamburger button on the top right, it’s just a flat list of links with no styling other than font and color. It could use a visual bounding box.
The user menu (when you click/tap your username) could use the same treatment and definitely needs some left padding so the text isn’t jammed along the edge.
The thumbnails should fill a fixed size box (though the size could/should scale with the user device’s display).
Some of the alignments get out of whack when interacting with interface elements. Like the subscribe/unsubscribe links in the community lists (also, those could look more like buttons instead of plain links).
I could have sworn there was a dark mode just earlier today when I turned off the “night mode” feature in my browser, but now it’s suddenly gone? In any case, would be nice to have, but my browser’s built in night mode works well enough.
There’s probably more, but I haven’t been there that long.
I’m intetested on what that would look like.
It occurred to me the hamburger button only shows on small displays. Nonetheless, I don’t think it needs to be anything too fancy. Just a little tweaking to signify “this is a control element”, similar to the sidebars. I just tweaked the CSS in dev tools and took a screenshot:
Also affects the element on wider screens
A couple of other things I noticed while writing this reply. It took me a bit to figure out that the [preview] button can be clicked again to return to “edit” mode. I think it the button should “edit” to indicate it’s function during preview mode.
I’m not a fan of how the search button immediately redirects to the advanced search. Personally, I’d prefer a text box with execute (the magnifying glass) and advanced buttons.
One last thing (for now lol) I noticed while reading comments is that some of the control icons are hidden without first clicking the menu button to expand the list. It seems like an unnecessary extra step when there’s ample space for all the icons anyway.