This applies to Gradle.com as well as parts of Gradle.org and the Plugin Portal.
Even though I have very good eyesight and color vision, the dazzling neon colors are extremely hard to read. I can’t imagine how hard it must be for people with color blindness.
I think neutral colors for text would be better, reserving bright colors for highlights/backgrounds. You could have a look at the new Jetbrains website. They also used some bright and fancy colors, but the text stays readable.
I agree with Stefan. I also complained about the readablity, especially on the fonts used. And, as I just realized, now there a these neon colors. Argh.
For readability with good font design, I like the new outfit of the german site www.heise.de.
Hi,
Thanks for taking the time to provide the feedback. In general, we are still tweaking and refining our styling incrementally. However, the styling is not a mistake and was done in consultation with specialists. Personal opinions to the styling aside, I just wanted to make the point that it is not accidental.
We are actively working on changing plugins.gradle.org, so let’s put that to one side also.
Which aspects of gradle.com do you particularly find hard to read?
Hi Luke,
thanks for the explanation. I had no doubt about the intent and I can see
the direction into which everything is shaping up.
The two colors I find problematic are the neon green and pink when combined
with white or other neon colors. This gives low contrast, which strains my
eyes at anything below “header” size.
I mostly put this under the gradle.com category as the new color palette
seems to originate there. The green for success and the pink for failure.
Big solid blocks of it work fine. Longer lines of small text not so much.
When combined with a darker background they work, e.g the neon green on
dark green at gradle.org.
What also really helped me was the change of the “tag” color on the plugin
portal. It is now a darker green on white and nicely readable.
Cheers,
Stefan
Wow … just went over to Gradle.com and the Splash page is down-right garish: Magenta on yellow, lime, and cyan, with an orange button. The only color missing was blue, but I see that’s present on the demo page. I haven’t seen color-clashes that bad since MySpace.
Gradle.org is suffering from advertising Gradle.com, so I’ll leave that alone, and just focus on the Gradle Docs site. All comments are from the perspective of a programmer with 3+ decades of staring at screens who has been wearing glasses for eyesight correction all his life, but who is not color-blind.
On the whole, the documentation is easy to read … with a couple of exceptions as noted above. Since that’s where I spend the majority of my time when browsing any of the Gradle sites, that’s fine by me.
The shade of green on gradle.org is a bit too bright to be readable, see the following screenshot:
I tried multiple screens (both cheap and good ones), and the contrast is bad on all of them.
The same applies to plugins.gradle.org as well.
Another screenshot that shows the problem (this time white text on green button):
(Sorry, for some reason I cannot put two images in one post?!)
Just a follow up… we’ve updated the style of https://plugins.gradle.org. If you had opinions about it previously, please take another look and let us know what you think.
Thanks Luke, the new plugin portal looks great =)
Also, just for the record, we are always listening and discussing internally everyone’s valuable feedback and participation, and we are very grateful to community members for pitching in and pointing out things we can improve. Just wanted to let you all know that even if there may not be instantaneous changes in all cases, you are being heard and taken seriously. Happy New Year also, by the way.
I want to support this thread and I want to say that colors are really extremal… and just tasteless, in my honest opinion. Thank you for your attention!
Thank you for your attention!