My attempt at a new Beehaw icon and site theme

Edit: I posted the first release of my theme based on the ideas in this post here!

Hi everyone!

I'm an Industrial/Product Designer in my professional life, and I was so inspired by @UrLogicFails's fantastic new community icons that I wanted to try out some of my own design ideas for Beehaw.

First, I tried my hand at an icon for Beehaw. I'm endeared to the little pixelated bee-cowboy we have now, but my background is in cleaner, more minimal designs that are easy to deploy to lots of different devices. A good logo sets a good first impression, and I want new users to see Beehaw as a real, legitimate alternative vision for social media. I've tried to recreate the back of a bee, and used the wings to form a subtle letter "B." My personal favorite is the hexagon bestagon, but I have both iOS and Android variations. Icon design is always really contentious, but it's also really fun - I'd love to see other people's ideas!

Second, I took a stab at tweaking the design of Beehaw, with the goals improving the layout and padding, introducing a more consistent color scheme, increasing legibility, and (of course) incorporating more bee elements. I'm working on a CSS theme that incorporates some of these changes, but others are beyond the scope of CSS injections and will require actual work on Lemmy-UI.

Light Theme:

Dark Theme:

I'd love to hear your thoughts, and I'm happy to share more if people are interested :)

Thanks for viewing, take care!