There’s a big change coming to your Tumblr experience…but only if you want it.
We’re introducing the Color Palette! It’s giving you the power to control the color of your dashboard (and the rest of our blue space) in your iOS and Android apps and on mobile web.
You can currently choose from three options:
True Blue, our default color scheme.
Dark Mode, for when you want to turn down the lights.
Low-Contrast Classic, our new low-contrast color scheme, complete with an old familiar blue so many of you love.
To check it out, just go to your settings in the app by tapping the silhouette icon, visiting “General settings,” and selecting “Color Palette.”
Good news! You can do just that, and so much more, with the new camera filters in your Tumblr app.
You now have rainbow filters, a glitch filter, and a neat building blocks filter, filters with mirror effects, and a few more. There’s a dozen waiting to be used on your photos, GIFs, and videos now.
To access these filters, simply:
Open up the Tumblr app (make sure you’ve updated to version 13.1 or later).
Tap the pencil at the bottom of your screen to open the post flower.
Select the GIF, photo, or video post type.
Tap the camera at the top of your screen.
See that disco ball? Tap it with care and open the door to your 12 new best filter friends.
Enjoy!
Like what you see? Take your best filter pics, tag them #tumblrfilters, and post them to your Tumblr to show them off to the whole community. The #tumblrfilters search is already bubbling with glitchy skies and rainbow dogs.
We know people on Tumblr love messaging. We also know they have a hard time sending their first message. How can a community of people who mostly don’t know each other IRL feel comfortable starting direct conversations with to each other? One solution we’re trying right now is icebreakers.
If you start a conversation with a mutual right now (try it!), you’ll see something like this:
Iteration
We went through through a few iterations of this interface, taking initial cues from the bites of information expected on a biz card—
—which seemed too formal, and were further pared down and made smaller:
A visually-centered information nugget felt right, and we experimented with further options inspired by other aspects of the Tumblr universe, such as displaying the recipient’s last few posts, or the entirety of their tumblr description:
Final Form
In the end, we rallied around a brief yet informative interface which adapted according to the the user’s context. Besides their username (obviously), we’ve added a small line that tells you one or two things a person posts about the most.
What if you’re not already mutuals? For one-way follows (or people who don’t follow each other at all), the messaging interface now gives you that context, too:
The recipient also gets information about the people who are messaging them: the sender’s username, description, and how long they’ve been following for.
This information should be enough to let you know if the person is a lurker, if they’re a dedicated follower, or if the two of you are mutuals.
As an additional layer of safety, we’ve included a small “Hey does this look like spam?” button, just in case of…well, spam.
This collection of interfaces makes up what we’ve dubbed “Icebreakers”, in the hope that they’ll help smooth out conversations between strangers, and maybe give ‘em something to talk about.
Conversations on Tumblr aren’t like conversations anywhere else. You can’t just leave a comment on someone else’s post. You have to bring that post, wholesale, over to your own blog, before adding your piece to the bottom of it. Good reblog commentary, in any context, sets off a whole new cycle of reblogging, sending a whole new set of conversations rolling around Tumblr, all of them picking up new comments as they go. It’s like a Katamari.
Transformative commentary in a reblog can completely change the meaning of a post. Old posts are rediscovered, already-weird posts get transcendentally weird.
But there were oddities with the way this commentary was presented.
These blocks of content get smaller as the conversation grows, which in turn increases the distance between the names of the users and whatever they said. It eventually makes the whole thing tricky to figure out—especially in the mobile app, where most people use Tumblr. If you enjoy someone’s commentary midway down a deep reblog tree, you probably aren’t going to follow that thin gray line back to the top of the post to find out who said it. Worse, deep conversations were being pushed completely off the post, effectively shutting them down.
There are charms to that chaos, but ultimately it can make Tumblr hard to approach for new people, and leaves posts vulnerable to being consumed by their own popularity.
So, how do you bring clarity to the reading experience while maintaining the constructive sensibility of reblog conversations? Turns out, a solution to this “who said what?” problem has existed since the creation of online chat. Simply listing the comments one after another was the first way it was done on the Plato Talkomatic, the grandfather of online chat, and it remains the clearest and easiest to read.
Initially we tried preserving the indentation of the original design by insetting the stack in a frame.
Trouble was, it meant that we were losing a tremendous amount of space for people to play with in the context of the reblog. Particularly on small screens, where space is already at a premium, we didn’t want to cut into space for creative responses with images, text, or literally whatever.
At the same time, we played around with including avatars next to commentary. Not only did it further clarify who said what, but it gave people a better chance of being recognized for adding something thoughtful or funny to a conversation.
In the end, we combined our favorite parts of the two of these, hoisting the avatar and username up above the commentary. It allowed us to include a little more interesting detail about the who-said-what, and give people as much space as possible to say anything they like. It also actually reduced the height of very long chains.
Ultimately, creative discourse is one of the things we love most about Tumblr. It’s a big part of the reason we’re all here. The mechanic that fuels that—posts being literally passed from blog to blog—isn’t going anywhere.
With the latest update, we wanted to open up discourse more: simply removing visual barriers allowed interesting, weird, and funny conversations from dying out before they even get rolling.
