Ok, many of y’all can have feelings about whether it’s a good idea to promote Nate’s and Eliezer’s book on the LW frontpage the way we are doing it, but can I get some acknowledgement that the design looks really dope?
Look at those nice semi-transparent post-items. Look at that nice sunset gradient that slowly fades to black. Look at the stars fading out in an animation that is subtle enough that you can (hopefully) ignore it as you scroll down and parse the frontpage, but still creates an airy ominous beauty to live snuffing out across the universe.
I hope I can do more cool things with the frontpage for other things in the future. I’ve long been wanting to do things with the LW frontpage that create a more aesthetic experience that capture the essence of some important essay or piece of content I want to draw attention to, and I feel like this one worked quite well.
I’ll probably experiment more with some similar things in the future (though I will generally avoid changing the color scheme this drastically unless there is some good reason, and make sure people can easily turn it off from the start).
I like the design, and think it was worth doing. Regarding making sure “people can easily turn it off from the start” next time, I wanted to offer the datapoint that it took me quite a while to notice the disable button. (It’s black on black, and quite at the edge of the screen, especially if you’re using a horizontal monitor).
a) Thanks for this post, I would never have noticed that the design was intended to be quite nice … and I would completely miss the “Earth with ominous red glow” on https://ifanyonebuildsit.com without reading this 😱
b) I bet you didn’t admire the beautiful design when trying to enjoy your morning coffee with the sun behind your back on a 10yo 4K monitor after a Win11 laptop refused to recognize that it supports 10bpc so it only uses 8bpc, in Firefox (that still doesn’t support gradient dithering), after some jerk forced dark mode on your favorite morning-news-before-work site that usually respects your OS settings (light mode during the day, dark before sleep) and they also removed the usual menu option to toggle it back, so you had to lean around the reflections to spot the subtle X button...
I can only give you my word that the terrible purple hues from my reading-warm color settings looked nothing like a sunset (and nothing like the intended indigo if I can judge the color from how it looks today on an iPad and/or Android, though they both only have sRGB displays and not showing real indigo hues like a rainbow or summer-night sky), and that I didn’t even notice the subtle scroll animations because I didn’t scroll anything... ...but feel free to judge the gradient banding for yourself:
Hopefully this comment is a useful data point when deciding to “do more cool things with the frontpage for other things in the future” ;)
Ok, many of y’all can have feelings about whether it’s a good idea to promote Nate’s and Eliezer’s book on the LW frontpage the way we are doing it, but can I get some acknowledgement that the design looks really dope?
The design is dope. I loved the lightcone-eating effect the moment I saw the original version on the book’s website.
I am glad that you are proud of it and I feel kind of bad saying this, but the reason I had mixed feelings about the promotion is that I just really don’t like the design. I find it visually exhausting to look at. Until you added the option to disable the theme, I was just avoiding the LW front page. I don’t like the design of https://ifanyonebuildsit.com/ either.
The disable special theme button should be bigger, I didn’t see it at first and it was not obvious to me that I could just switch it off with one click.
You sure can! I considered posting a shortform to that effect when I first saw it; love the colors and the night-sky effect. It’s nice to have a bit of eye candy on the frontpage :)
The book will probably be a treat to read, but since “someone” (Open AI, Anthropic, Google, META et al.) apparently WILL build “it” everyone WILL die. Oh well, we had a good run I guess.
Design of the frontpage: No. I am fan of the white clean design with the occasional AI generated image. The current iteration reduces readability a lot.
Ok, many of y’all can have feelings about whether it’s a good idea to promote Nate’s and Eliezer’s book on the LW frontpage the way we are doing it, but can I get some acknowledgement that the design looks really dope?
Look at those nice semi-transparent post-items. Look at that nice sunset gradient that slowly fades to black. Look at the stars fading out in an animation that is subtle enough that you can (hopefully) ignore it as you scroll down and parse the frontpage, but still creates an airy ominous beauty to live snuffing out across the universe.
Well, I am proud of it :P[1]
I hope I can do more cool things with the frontpage for other things in the future. I’ve long been wanting to do things with the LW frontpage that create a more aesthetic experience that capture the essence of some important essay or piece of content I want to draw attention to, and I feel like this one worked quite well.
I’ll probably experiment more with some similar things in the future (though I will generally avoid changing the color scheme this drastically unless there is some good reason, and make sure people can easily turn it off from the start).
(Also credit to Ray who did the initial pass of porting over the design from ifanyonebuildsit.com)
I like the design, and think it was worth doing. Regarding making sure “people can easily turn it off from the start” next time, I wanted to offer the datapoint that it took me quite a while to notice the disable button. (It’s black on black, and quite at the edge of the screen, especially if you’re using a horizontal monitor).
a) Thanks for this post, I would never have noticed that the design was intended to be quite nice … and I would completely miss the “Earth with ominous red glow” on https://ifanyonebuildsit.com without reading this 😱
b) I bet you didn’t admire the beautiful design when trying to enjoy your morning coffee with the sun behind your back on a 10yo 4K monitor after a Win11 laptop refused to recognize that it supports 10bpc so it only uses 8bpc, in Firefox (that still doesn’t support gradient dithering), after some jerk forced dark mode on your favorite morning-news-before-work site that usually respects your OS settings (light mode during the day, dark before sleep) and they also removed the usual menu option to toggle it back, so you had to lean around the reflections to spot the subtle X button...
I can only give you my word that the terrible purple hues from my reading-warm color settings looked nothing like a sunset (and nothing like the intended indigo if I can judge the color from how it looks today on an iPad and/or Android, though they both only have sRGB displays and not showing real indigo hues like a rainbow or summer-night sky), and that I didn’t even notice the subtle scroll animations because I didn’t scroll anything...
...but feel free to judge the gradient banding for yourself:
Hopefully this comment is a useful data point when deciding to “do more cool things with the frontpage for other things in the future” ;)
I will be honest… that banding looks fine to me. I agree it’s a bit worse, but I don’t think it’s like, destroying the design or anything.
To be clear, we didn’t remove the menu to toggle it back. In the same place where the usual menu is it just has an off-switch:
(This did go live like 24 hours or so after the banner was put up, so there was a period where you couldn’t turn it off, which was unfortunate)
The design is dope. I loved the lightcone-eating effect the moment I saw the original version on the book’s website.
I am glad that you are proud of it and I feel kind of bad saying this, but the reason I had mixed feelings about the promotion is that I just really don’t like the design. I find it visually exhausting to look at. Until you added the option to disable the theme, I was just avoiding the LW front page. I don’t like the design of https://ifanyonebuildsit.com/ either.
The disable special theme button should be bigger, I didn’t see it at first and it was not obvious to me that I could just switch it off with one click.
It really does look dope
You sure can! I considered posting a shortform to that effect when I first saw it; love the colors and the night-sky effect. It’s nice to have a bit of eye candy on the frontpage :)
yeah, the design is super duper dope. the red fading out the white is a nice touch.
I like the new design a lot, I’d like if I could use it as my default LW theme. I felt this way about the Ghibli one too.
(This one can also function as a silly reminder not to habitually scroll so far)
The book will probably be a treat to read, but since “someone” (Open AI, Anthropic, Google, META et al.) apparently WILL build “it” everyone WILL die. Oh well, we had a good run I guess.
Design of the frontpage: No. I am fan of the white clean design with the occasional AI generated image. The current iteration reduces readability a lot.