My attempt at a new Beehaw icon and site theme

sintamo@beehaw.org to Creative@beehaw.org – 174 points –

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!

57

Hey there. This is beautiful work! I can't speak for all the other admins but I have strong opinions on the logo. To me, the logo needs to be both bee and haw and I don't want it to feel watered down or presented in a way to be appealing to all the masses. To me it's meant to be cute, radical, and kinda in your face with it's absurdity. I don't think it can be done in such an abstract way without losing too much character. But that's just my 2c.

The themes are quite clean, however, which is definitely what I think we need to reduce visual clutter and make things easy to find. Thank you so much for putting this all together, it's great work!

Thank you for the kind words! I agree, I said in another comment but this is all "bee" and no "haw" in a way I figured wouldn't quite fit the feeling of the site. My design practice is unfortunately so "commercial" that it's hard to get my preconceived notions of icon design out of my head. Balancing approachability and character is tough! If I do another round, I'm gonna somehow get a cowboy hat in there haha

I think the logo is cool and I like the dark theme a lot! If I can provide one constructive comment, perhaps the light mode yellow-text-on-white could have a little more contrast to increase readability of community names.

My design background is in making silly memes... maybee the bee could have a little more haw in it so I "designed" this:

It think tweaking the specific shade of yellow to get better contrast is a good suggestion, I just lifted the shade from the community icons and ran with it haha. And I agree, this is very much a "bee" icon and not a "haw" one - you joke, but finding a way to incorporate a cowboy hat seems like a great idea to me!

Was going to say, the light theme definitely misses some accessibility standards. I'd opt for black text on the yellow buttons, and maybe tweak the yellow a bit darker for further readability.

Love the hat!

This is seriously impressive...... I love it! I'm the director of a design agency as my day job and work with branding often. If someone hit me this as a client refresh or new brand option, I would be pumped. It's clever, memorable, current and fresh.

I don't know if it's the look Beehaw are going for (I don't know enough about the instance :) but this is strong enough to stand as primary brand mark for sure.

Only thing I would mention (which I think I have seen on the thread) is there may be some web accessibility issues on the colour contrast side of things, I would look to touch these up if it went into production.

You may be on the product side of things, but this is legit very accomplished work!

Kudos my dude..... An epic job ;)

I think it looks like a butt sitting on a yellow table.

whole thing ruined now. you’re right, and i hate it

I came to say the same thing. It's even more apparent if you have your display in black and white!

Beautiful work! All the other admins will be waking up soon and, I'm sure, will want to discuss.

The white text on yellow background is hard to read.

I would suggest to change the yellow parts of the light theme to another colour, like brown or dark gold/mustard

No offense to you personally, but I really don't like that kind of logo design. I feel it lacks personality and uniqueness. I've seen an awful lot of companies redo their logos along those lines and they were almost invariably worse than the original. I look forward to this trend coming to an end.

Using hexagonal shapes and yellows for UI elements is certainly fitting, though.

Yeah, I feel like it is trendy and would get lost amongst the sea of similar designs. So I think it fits with what OP was looking for, making it look "professional" and by extention legitimate. However I don't really think that's what is best. I like the little bee and his little hat. He's friendly. This looks too corporate for my taste. I do like the hexagon. But the bee needs his hat.

I would like to be very clear I think it looks great! It achieves what OP stated they were going for. It looks professional. I just think professional is a bit bland and not a change I'd be very enthused about. Perhaps I am in the minority however. It's not like I would fight a change to this if it was decided this would be what is best for beehaw.

Yellow is a really difficult colour to work with when it comes to an accent in theme.

Instead of the backgrounds, being black and white, I’d suggest a charcoal and a tawny; give it a more homely feel; which is what Beehaw aims to be.

Looks great, needs some warmth

I’d maybe recommend copying the homework of Commbank

And Monarch from Quantum Break

What's the Picasso quote? Great artists steal? :P This is a good suggestion, I'll definitely try it out! I've long used #f7f7f7 for white and #1a1a1a for black, but breaking that dogma here could be valuable

This is the Fediverse!

We are not bound by petty conventions and copyright!

I like the idea of being able to side step the homogenisation of the modern web. BeeHaw is free to have a soul! And I’d like that soul to be cozy

I like this because I can see the bee in it (when I know it's meant to be a bee) but I think it's lacking some more defined features because currently at a glance it just looks like a region of colour.

Yeah, I think for this I'd prefer something that is very specifically and obviously a bee. With a cowboy hat or something.

This is absolutely gorgeous! Simplistic but also detailed in a nice manner. You have my vote for making this the official logo!

In the dark theme, the super bright yellow is distracting focus away from the content.

White on yellow isn't great for readability and accessibility. Otherwise, looks pretty nice!

The light theme is good, although I would recommend changing the yellow text to a darker shade, or changing the color entirely (yellow on white is really hard to read). And the dark theme is perfect! The icons are amazing, too :)

I just need lemmy to be more horizontal; use 100% width and use less lines.

Just to pile on with everyone else, but I really love the themes, especially the dark one!

I like this so much! I hope you end up doing that second pass to try incorporating the hat.

i like the designs you've made for the webpage! the accenting colours really makes a difference. i didn't realise how much i'd appreciate a redesign until i saw https://crystals.rest

i like the approach you took with the icon, although my favourite component of the current icon is the goofiness of it. i think a lot of that got lost in your redesign. or as others have put it, "it's lacking some haw" :p

Damn, crystals.rest is beautiful. This may be my pixel and retro game aesthetic bias speaking though...

The icons are very distinctive but their colours feel off to me regarding bees.

Looks wonderful! I would certainly use the dark theme version if it was made available here on beehaw. 👍👌

If you'd still like to try the dark theme, I just released a theme based on this post! Would love to hear your feedback :)

ah darn, now I gotta make an icon for fedi196
thanks /j

I'll get around to doing that eventually lol

I like the layout/theme changes, but still prefer the existing logo tbh - it kinda has more character.

I really like the theme! I'm trying to create my own theme for fun and the finalized code for html/css is a MESS. Makes me want to rip out my hair it's so messy.