A fresh coat of paint for your docs

Hi Coda Community,

You probably saw our announcement about a new look for your docs. Or maybe you just refreshed your doc and saw something new :smiley:. We realized as you all built more and more amazing docs, that our existing look had a lot of distracting pieces around it. It was taking away attention from what mattered most, and that is the great content that you all have created. So our designers put their heads together and figured out a way to bring focus back to the content.

You can read in more detail about our process in the post. We’re excited about this update, and hope you guys love it too. Please share the news and let us know what you think!

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So… Coda now uses my system default sans-serif font instead of a consolidated custom one? I get Segoe UI (Windows), the screenshot above shows San Francisco (Mac).

P.S. Yeah, I see it in the CSS:

body.visualRefresh#coda-body {
    font-family: system-ui, sans-serif;
    ...
}

A custom, predictable font was better IMO. Otherwise looks great.

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Definitely a backwards step IMHO (the font change). It would be better if we could choose our own, if you are using the default sets

Yeah, a typeface chosen by system across multiple devices is a bit rough especially for the Coda brand.

In a pinch you could use Stylebot on Chrome to replace the font family.

Great suggestion - thanks

We had no idea Medium was doing this and are working to try to fix it. Seems that Medium somehow decided to adopt it behind their paywall which is in no way what we wanted.

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Should be fixed now.

Thanks for the prompt response and fix! Once you’re ready to start monetizing Coda the usual way, I’ll be here :money_with_wings:

I can, but then I’ll have no guarantee that others will see the doc just as I intended.

First example that comes to mind is my snake game, where horizontal gaps were picked to be 6px wide to match font line heights (vertical gaps). I adjusted them for the new font before realizing it was a system-dependent one. Guess my snake game will not look proportional on Macs.

I know it’s an extreme example — it’s unlikely that anyone else will make LCD-like games on Coda as a real use case scenario :slight_smile: Still it can affect docs that rely on some beautification and branding (e.g. use of emoji, rectangles as custom charts, maybe something else too)

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Am I the only one who loves the change?

Subtle, but it’s just cleaner enough to keep me focused on exactly what I need. (And that was one of the things that kept me from giving Coda.io a chance at first — I felt overwhelmed by a lot of stuff on the screen…)

Thanks for the improvement!

3 Likes

No, I prefer it, too.

P.S. The snake game still looks great on a Mac. :wink:

1 Like

Like the change guys. Seems like a step in the direction of what I’d really like to see - ability to have a doc start to resemble one of the popular task tracking apps out there - Asana, Wrike, ClickUp, Teamwork, Jira, etc, etc. so that when a larger team is onboard, who is used to these types of interfaces, Coda could fit in and be used as well.

Keep up the great work and fast iterations!

2 Likes