On all the sites, the tag names started appearing bold in the last 15 or so minutes. Looks rather garish. Is this some new un-announced feature release?
For example:
One of the worst affected pieces of UI is the "Watched Tags" box, which can easily end up with ten or more lines of bold text. Here is a screenshot provided by user 0stone0:
Several users (1, 2, 3) pointed out in comments that this is likely related to Seeking feedback on tag colors update
This is what the new tags look like on Software Engineering Stack Exchange, with an example of a question with a watched tag and a question without, using the home view (which doesn't show a question excerpt).
The tags are extremely overpowering.
In this view, the most important content is the question title. However, the bold of the tags draws my eyes away from the question title to the tags. The next most important metadata is the votes, answers, views, asker, and asked/answered/modified timestamp. The tags, in my opinion, are tertiary content. However, they are more prominent than the primary or second pieces of information that I look at when browsing.
This is extremely distracting.
The problematic part here is not the design change itself. It can be changed again, some people might even find it better.
The actual problem, which is x1000 worse than any possible design change is the total lack of communication between Stack Exchange and their users. The users who, well, use it. Make it what it is.
And this is what makes me really sad, and more determined in my view that Stack Exchange does not want to even try and bridge gaps, or communicate with the users: they choose to do things their way, and nothing will stop them.
To clarify, this is not a minor design change. It's a major change, affecting all sites, and millions of users who see something very different out of the blue. In an healthy site, there would have been at least announcement about such a change. Sadly, SE is not healthy, for way too long.
Technically, it was announced half year ago in Seeking feedback on tag colors update, however:
So sorry, but that does NOT count as communication or helpful announcement.
CSS snippet to (partially) revert this rather peculiar design:
.s-tag {
font-weight: normal !important;
}
In case you haven't installed it, here are some quick links to Stylus:
.s-tag__required { background: #ffecec; color: #af3235 !important; border: 1px solid #eccdce; } to restore the reddish colors of required tags (not sure if that's the correct colors of previous version though, but it looks much better than this all-gray aspect)
I already expressed my preference in the original meta enquiry proposing the changes, & included a gif comparison of all 4 suggestions, so I don't really need to cover that ground again.
In short, I don't like the bold. I don't like anything that tries to look more important than it actually is.
In case people didn't get chance to see a direct before & after, I managed to screenshot a couple of pages in the before & after versions [sorry, one is inverted to the other, the source images are gone now]:-
I think it is supposed to grab your attention, but the title is the most important part! Now, it both is ugly and distracting to me. Shouldn't SE at the very least communicate with its users? Just like the advertising problem, it was announced 5 months before, make us think they're just kidding, and just smack us in the face 5 months later.
This change is (again) communicated poorly, nor does it resemble what seems to be considered its 'announcement'.
Part of the agreement struck last year between SE Inc. and the moderator team, was that SE Inc. would report changes in a timely manner:
Committing to transparency
Stack Exchange, Inc. staff will be as transparent as possible about product development and policy, regularly sharing updates and proposed changes. Releases will be communicated in a timely manner. Whenever possible, staff will provide insights behind key product and policy decisions to the community.
Arguably none of these points have been met.
The question Seeking feedback on tag colors update was "seeking feedback" on "exploring options" about "identifying a direction" in which the design could be taken (feedback on colors, as pointed out in another answer here). That post clearly emphasised how a potential redesign was at a preliminary stage.
The most upvoted answers there point out option #3 is the best of the four options given, and give general feedback, not absolutes.
Yet here we are, with a sudden, unannounced design change based on a limited set of options. The official 'announcement' of the change we're seeing now followed almost 12 hours after it was noticed by the OP.
Moreover, the proposed example option (#3) and the design change that was implemented are in fact different from each other:
 |
|---|
| Proposed design #3 (cropped) |
 |
| Implemented design |
 |
 |
|---|---|
| Proposed design #3 (detail) | Implemented design (detail) |
As you can see, the font and padding are both different, which has a big impact on how the change is perceived.
This is not about whether or not the change is an improvement*—this is about the lack of communication and cooperation concerning this change.
The special formatting for tags given inside a post are now rendered as simple links, instead of the border. (I don't like the bold on the question's tags either.)
Snapshots of a portion of a sandbox answer that has lots of tags in its body:
... and ...
... However, the edit preview renders them in their boldness.
This occurs on my Mac and on my Windows laptops, regardless of browser.
I recommend that the font used for tags be reduced to normal weight.
I've worked in graphic design (text and titles for television) for 30 years now and I can attest, as a professional, that using bold for the tags is the wrong design choice.
Encountering a different font size, style, or weight increases cognitive load and fatigue. Mismatching weights diminishes harmony and repels readers.
The title is larger, but lighter weight; whereas the tags are smaller, but heavier weight. The two are fighting for prominence in conflicting ways.
A good way to test to see what's most prominent is to squint and blur your eyes until the text is unreadable but only the structure of the page remains. In this case, the boldness of the font combined with its darker background makes the tags much more prominent than the question title -- even as prominent as the title at the top of the page.
Here's a visualization of prominence of the Stack Overflow page, which I think helps convey how unnecessarily prominent the tags are:
The bold font, I guess to some degree it's more attention grabbing in that aspect? But I find bringing the colors back from having a contrasted background makes it far less attention grabbing, at least on dark mode on SO.
If it were between tags looking like buttons and what we have now, I'd take the current one every time.
But I would prefer for it to not be bold.
This is not an un-announced feature release. The feature was announced in November 2023, where four options were given to us for the new tag design. The two top-voted answers there prefer Option 3. Option 3 has been implemented, and it looks exactly like the pictures in the proposal. I honestly can't understand the whole negativity here.
If we want SE to ask us for feedback, we should be consistent and avoid throwing accusations at them when they do ask for feedback and implement it exactly.
Removing color from the tags feels like spelling death for the tag system.
Using bold just doesn't compensate for the loss of color. So I'm going to quote from the top-voted post that proposed the adopted change (emphasis mine):
Option #3, while similar to Option #2, changes these two unnecessary properties. The bold text makes it stand out sufficiently, without drawing too much attention.
I think it's key to consider specific site use! On SO the first thing I look at when opening a post (let's say for review or curation - or during research) are the tags! Because they'll either place a post within my skill set or outside of it; they let me know at a glance -without needing to look at the code&wall-of-text- if I can even consider the post and if I'm interested in it at all... And the same goes for skimming over a list of questions. Now, when I'm on a language site the title and excerpt are much more descriptive, but at least on the tech sites de-emphasizing the tags seems like a mistake that'll will have overall negative consequences for usability that no one's mentioning. (In dark mode it's even worst than in light mode atm I think.)
Here is a countermeasure for this style error for Tampermonkey:
(function() {
'use strict';
const style = document.createElement('style');
style.innerHTML = ".s-tag { font-weight: normal !important; }";
document.head.appendChild(style);
})();
