🚀 Product Update: everything gets a little prettier

Our August Week 2 product update that we share internally with the Crew team, keeping them up to date on the product changes to Unsplash over the past week.

After last week’s silent launch of search, we did the marketing push on search this week, and focused on really improving our existing features, with a bunch of changes to do with the site’s layout and visuals.

In true Unsplash fashion, it’s another iteration that most people won’t actively notice, but all users should feel.

Photo page

On the photo page, Kirill Zakharov lightened the whole thing up, solving one of our least favourite problems about the photo page’s design: the heavy darkening of the photo. It may seem like a small change, but since serving photos as large and uncluttered as possible is central to our design goals, this is a big change.

It really makes a huge difference on photos with light colours at the top of the photo.

This shows the overlay at it’s most noticeable: on a plain light colour.

On most photos you won’t even notice the overlay now

Notice though that the UI is still completely readable on photos with light backgrounds.

Feed improvements

We switched up the positioning of some of the buttons to be more consistent between grid view and the photo page.

On mobile, Naoufal Kadhom expanded the layout to make the photos appear edge-to-edge.

Much better.

We continued tweaking the photo peeking adding new animations to the UI components, removing the temporary flash of content.

So smooth

New navigation & headers

Kirill Zakharov made a bunch of changes to the navigation and headers.

Some of the goals were:

• put more focus on search
• use a left-aligned logo navigation (research shows center-aligned navigations are more confusing)
• add a submit a photo CTA to the top right corner (setting us up for a time when we may have a stronger CTA—cough remixes cough)
• make our headers more consistent and simplified. Check out that beautiful bold Helvetica. Note also: the ‘New’ feed now has a title, removing the confusing similar header to the homepage.
• drop the ’10 every 10 days’ line, since too many people still think Unsplash is a site for only 10 photos every 10 days

This is also the design that sets us up to support following and the home feed (our two major product changes for Q3).

On the backend, Charles did some maintenance on specs, patched a security vulnerability, improved the API applications admin area, fixed a bug in search where we couldn’t return more than 1000 objects, and the team continued work on the home feed.

TTU: 4.2M minutes (+14.0% over the same week a month ago)