Edit: This link is outdated, see new poll here https://programming.dev/post/190520

Hey everyone

Wanted to run a poll about the community icons to choose between a couple options

Option 1 - Use UBP icons - Use unified icons for all of the communities similar to beehaw

Option 2 - Use UBP for general communities and specific language, etc. icons for specific communities

Option 3 - Dont use UBP icons

Vote using the strawpoll here (doing strawpoll so it can be ranked voting) [removed in favor of new post]

EDIT: I have remade the poll with two more options. If you voted in the previous one please vote again in this. The new options are just for adding different colored gradients to the unified icons for different communities

Quick example of this:

  • l4sgcEnglish
    3·
    2 years ago

    My top choice for icon shape is definitely the vertical hexagons we have now, but the poll should probably include options for both vertical and horizontal hexagons. Maybe square and squircle as well.

    • ruffslEnglish
      6·
      2 years ago

      I think this should be done via CSS, rather than baking in the masked shape into the PNGs. We could customize our instance’s default bootstrap theme for Lemmy-UI. This would allow us to keep the icon artwork unaltered as full-size square canvases, then mask them client side based on the user’s preferred theme or custom layout. E.g. allowing the user to distinguish user avatars versus community icons based on masking shape, like on GitHub.

      There is a growing development of RES like user side enhancements for Lemmy:

      • l4sgcEnglish
        3·
        2 years ago

        Yes letting everyone choose their own icon shape is a great idea, and thanks for sharing that script, I’ve been missing the compact view!

      • AtegonOPMAEnglish
        2·
        2 years ago

        Ill likely try to get that working in the instance and then the poll can just be the default option

      • Paradox42English
        1·
        2 years ago

        While I personally like the idea of having the shape be decided by user/instance CSS choices, would that not potentially reduce the immediate brand recognition, when those outside our instance see our community icons?

        • ruffslEnglish
          2·
          2 years ago

          If folks vote for the UBP option, then I think that unified color palette and aesthetic would be a reasonable enough clue of instance origin.

          That said, if we did hardcode shapes into our instance icons, it’s not like there’s a lot of maskable radial shapes to choose from that would:

          • fit inside the default circle that remote Lemmy instances would render our community icons as.
          • not overly crop out or limit the artwork canvas with fat dilated margins.
          • https://maskable.app/

          With hexagons, octagons, rotated 45 or 30 degree offsets, at tens of pixels font heights: those are hardly differentiable at some point. So regardless, we could easily collide with other servers already that choose hexagons, or any polygon that fits in Lemmy’s minimum circle mask.