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!
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.