• She/Her

I have become so gay I have gained the power of mecha!


jaidamack
@jaidamack

Seen a few comments that the dark/inverted mode is ugly and... yeah? Like, you've seen Cohost. It looks like someone skinned a fast food restaurant that didn't survive the 1970s in here. The colour palette looks like there should be a sign over the door that reads 'Stevenson's' and the menu treats mushy peas like a condiment. That slight beige yellowing at the window frames that don't get opened enough. Those threadbare burgundy cushions. It's comfortable, sure, but it's not pretty.


doctorwednesday
@doctorwednesday

As someone who could be broadly designated a 'stylist,' I like that Cohost isn't trying to look slick or stylish. The internet is just larded with adequate design which ticks all the right boxes aesthetically but never takes chances (oh and is usually garbage in terms of functionality and flow), and as a designer you really do get sick of it after a while. You just want to see somebody's hand-made webpage with the starfield background and flashing rainbow text. If Cohost looks like a waiting area in an airport in Dayton, Ohio in 1973, that's fine with me.


jaidamack
@jaidamack

I worry that my original post might be interpreted as hostile to this design - the opposite is true! I like how the place looks. I enjoy the fact it looks like someone tried to design my grandfather a letterhead. I'm sick and tired of websites consistently polishing the edges off of everything that gives it an identity; I hate how the bevels all disappeared and now we've got indecipherable coloured runes to tell us which Google product wants to access our contacts, our phone, our blood type. It's a very pleasant and distinct kind of ugly, like a pub where the bartender hates you but there's very comfortable seats by the dartboard.


doctorwednesday
@doctorwednesday

And I wasn't trying to call you out, I was merely USING YOU as an opportunity to proclaim that I enjoy this kind of look as a respite from the panorama of tryhard websites. I'm probably one of the few designers who feels that CSS was a betrayal, although I'm sure I'm far from the only designer who hates design. <3 You read these design magazines and see amazing, innovative stuff that you wish you could do... and then you get into the industry and every client wants the same bland trash, you work under a neurotic marketing shill who wants you to make it look like everything else. You get replaced by Squarespace. So then you start to want bad design, as an act of protest, as a return to a naivety which won't remind you of your idiot colleagues. You start to see good design as a burden, like having to wear a necktie every day, like pretending you don't want to stab your co-workers in the throat with a pen. You want to say to design, "don't be here when I get back." So I'll take some beige, sure. I'll take all your beige.

(a message from the Vixen Appreciator Mutual Dick-Sucking Club)



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in reply to @jaidamack's post:

The thing about the dark mode on here is that it doesn't...fit the rest of the site's appearance. Like what you and many have said: it's a cozy kind of ugly, but it's not horrendous. Yet dark mode makes it look like there's a void of text that, ironically, pops out among the rest of the cozier look and feel of the site.

Idk, it just feels...off compared to light mode.