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 think it should look a bit more like old.reddit + RES (though not a copy). Pretty much if the choice is between looking more like old.reddit + RES or looking like new Reddit, go with the old.
Some specific issues I am seeing:
Half my screen is dead space, and why is the sidebar right up against the main column of text?
Extraneous stuff should be right (or left, depending on layout) justified, putting space between the main content and the sidebar. Also, let the center column be wider if someone has a wider screen.
I would like to be able to expand text or images without going all the way into the post. Basically, push everything else down and show the post, but leave the user on the front page and don’t load the comments.
You can expand the text of a post by clicking on the book option. Posts with image urls can be expanded by clicking on the thumbnail. I’ll take a crack at the whitespace stuff when I get the chance.
Ah, I didn’t see that icon. Might I suggest that the icon replace the blank thumbnail space for text posts then? Smaller than the thumbnail space, larger than the current icon. And I may have been assuming the images acted like the text posts. Hmm. Or perhaps there is not enough visual distinction between image posts and website URLs. I see now that there is an icon in the upper-right corner of the image. Maybe I just need to retrain to figure that out.
I mentioned this in another piece of the thread, so I don’t know if you saw it, but a website I go to a lot (Royal Road) solved whitespace with a nice neutral-to-slightly dark landscape that everything goes over. So this way central column width could be expanded a bit without covering the whole screen.
Improving on that idea, perhaps you can even provide several options in the settings. Nothing high res, that’s not the point, but a pleasant space filler.