By the powers invested in me by me, myself and I, alone, I hereby appeal to You.
I think it would be helpful to create a concise and widely supported description of the problems many of us seem to be having with parts of the reform that do not fit neatly into the bug/suggestion sheet.
There are many aspects to this, and some are aesthetic issues that are hard to quantify or make boolean, rather they are qualitative, subjective, emotional – which it takes description, even emoting – to communicate.
As an example of the “soft” differences I’m talking about, let me tell you about the “blue on white”, and what it means to me.
Dark text on white is always very distinct.
Out of all dark colours, blue is the most weighty – while not as immediately demanding of attention as red – it is, on a white background, a message of pertinence, salience.
So, having a screen full of blue-on-white is tantamount to being in a room full of stock brokers, all shouting their important messages at me. I get numb, migraine soon follows, along with an uncharacteristic desire to declare for Communism as an excuse to putting them all against the wall! Well, obviously, the Communism only works against stock brokers, but you get the idea, I hope.
In short, it drives me up the wall.
Not right away, it’s an insidiously building feeling which combines angst, stress, teeth-clenching wariness and undirected aggression. A state of general alarm, in other words.
It is not conducive to well-being. I would like to see a reduction of contrast between text and background, after all, contrast is relative – in a high-contrast environment, lower-contrast parts (like the takeaways) become well-nigh invisible.
With a lower contrast, there would be less need to “shout”, visually.
Swapping the white for gray would help, contrast can also mean other things than just contrast in brightness – using different tones of color can make things stand out. But for that I would suggest consulting a visual crafts professional, after all TR should want to have an appearance that will let IT professionals read also quite long texts, without having to forcibly controlling their own reading attention against the pull of high-salience elements.
PS: If you have a grief that you think falls into the “soft” area (if you can’t quite put your finger on it, that’s a good hint), you can put it here half-formed, we can then help each other with defining it and searching for root causes.
The ideal goal would be to form a set of specific suggestions to modify the site in a more functional, more user-friendly direction.
For Jason Hiner, that’s of course “an even more functional, even more user-friendly direction.” 😉 :p
