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@phenomlab - hey, I'm Vlad, I'm working with NodeBB team on Harmony theme design. So you can blame me for most design change while we polish the details and experiment with various options!

Adding color to a post counter when the topic's unread is a great idea - thanks for it!

In your screenshot the unread dot looks particularly small! It might a bug. Will look into it.

I must admit I was the one who promoted consistent topic title text color. It's quite probable that, while striving for the page to look good, I broke your user flows accidentally. My apologies! Let's bring the blue color back for unread titles.

I will, however, stay strong on keeping the font weight. I did reduce it from 700 to 500 (not 400 or 300 actually). Can you spend some time with this font weight and let us know your opinion after you get used to it a bit?

Thanks.

@crazycells it is partially available already, please open this link:

index

then squeeze the browser window to minimum width (or, open this link on a mobile device). Note - this is only a design prototype, it has almost no interactions, and there are bugs here and there.

Hi everyone! I'm Vlad, the designer working with NodeBB team on the Harmony theme. I'd like to tell a bit more about the reasoning behind some of the design decisions we made.

A picture is worth a thousand words, and an interactive prototype is worth a thousand pictures Here is the design prototype for you to play with (work in progress, changing all the time):

https://nodebb.vlad.studio/

Here are some of the goals that the new theme aims to achieve:

• improve the consistency of NodeBB design;
• convey the appropriate look&feel: readable, neutral, refreshing, comfortable;
• focus on content;
• be future-proof, avoid design trends, so that NodeBB will not look outdated for at least 4-5 years;
• have no strong personality of its own (to be the basis for further customization).

Removing the top bar and introducing sidebars was the radical change indeed; I'm glad Julian and the team thought it through and approved! I believe this deserves the detailed explaination.

Sidebars aim to solve 3 problems the current NodeBB theme design:

1. When there are too many sticky elements on top of page, on smaller wide screens not much space remains to read actual content.

2. When a post content uses the entire page width, the lines become too long to read.

3. Not as critical – but you have to learn what these icons mean before you can meaningfully use them. As a general rule, only universally-known icons (such as shopping cart) should be used without text labels.

Sidebar solves all these problems, and has already become a common UX pattern, used in Notion, Linear, Slack, Todoist, and so on.

Thanks!