This is a short little post to explain my reasoning with the recent UI skin overhaul I embarked on. It’s quite simple. Before I had a website that looked a tad bit “too corporate”. It felt eerie. Because it was the effort of one man, and as such did not have much content on it. But it also tried to look and speak as if it was a major startup with backing. It really had a strange Backrooms feeling to it. Then of course, the elephant in the room, TaigaChat itself. Before it had a nice 2020-esque “elite gamer” feeling to it. Very divisive. No longer in vogue. And nauseating for me. It had to go. So this is what I did.
For the website I wanted to emphasize that this is not some corporate-shilled modern hypeware. I wanted to emphasize the human aspect of it. And so I looked at three of my favorite projects that I believe have that human divine spark to them. Those were Zig, FreeBSD and Arcan. I looked at their websites. Ultimately I think you can tell which one I was the most inspired by.
As for TaigaChat I realized I had to support two vastly different themes. This was such that I could easily tell what CSS belonged to the “theme” and what parts were essential and should be shared accross all other themes that I wish to support in the future. So I made two themes. One I call pretty. And one that I call elite. The purpose of the elite one is actually to just be a minimal low-effort theme that reminds of a Hollywood hacker’s terminal setup. A little trolltheme if you will. The other I put in a tiny bit more effort into. The pretty theme was supposed to be inoffensive, and also not subject to fashion trends (like the TaigaChat gamer era was). For it I took some inspiration from a certain big tech company and their HIG guide. Not the new HIG, which was most likely designed to be very hard to replicate in CSS. But the old one, when it still looked plain and boring. This theme will have to do until I can get some more stylistically gifted people on board with TaigaChat.
-- Alexander