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by alfredxing 2665 days ago
I don't love the design, but what bothers me more is that I disagree with many of the premises informing the decisions, for example:

  - Github tab icons are purely decorative
  - Because we simplified the whole header, we don’t need that color coding anymore
  - Commits often touch files for completely arbitrary reasons, so the last commit tells you almost nothing
  - Get rid of gradients, dirty washed-out colors, unnecessary separators
Finally, cramming so much into one view makes it harder to navigate, not easier.
3 comments

This 100%. The icons are _not_ purely decorative, they're important visual anchors. They are consistently relevant and descriptive. They've been around for ages now so even if they weren't straightforward devs have learned them already.

It would be like changing the save button because no one uses floppies anymore.

Last commit on files is one of the first things I look at when scanning a new repo.

Changing the colors is about the only recommendation I could tolerate.

> Github tab icons are purely decorative

I actually agreed with that one. He made a pretty compelling argument. The icons aren't universal, and I have to read the words every time anyway.

I don't know. In his giant image asking if the icon is the commit icon, my first though was "history".

I was actually looking forward for me being hilariously wrong, and GitHub having made funnily incomprehensible icons, and he did not deliver!

I agree they aren't universal, so it's not so useful for first-time users, but once you get to learn them I find they help a lot with scanning and recognition.
> Commits often touch files for completely arbitrary reasons, so the last commit tells you almost nothing

That is mostly true if you are casually browsing a repository you are interested in. It is definitely not true if you are a contributor/owner of the repository.