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Updated 9 months ago

Navigator scope lines

At a glance
The Navigator panel shows vertical lines indicating the "scope" of each component (i.e., what's nested inside). These guides are great because they help identify component nesting at a glance.

However, the relatively dark color of these lines makes them seem more visually important than needed. This distracts from the components themselves and makes the structure tree look "busy."

Suggestion: Lightening the color (or decreasing the opacity) of those vertical lines would shift the visual focus in the panel to the components. As a result, the Navigator would appear less "busy."

This approach is similar to designing tables to focus on the data by lightening the cell borders.
Attachments
navigator-borders_suggested.png
navigator-borders_current.png
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12 comments
An addition to that idea would be colored sections. There's a VS code extension that does color code folding.
Both suggestions might be problematic for accessibility concerns though.
How does the VS Code extension handle color accessibility? Probably just restricts to specific colors... but that could get quite complex. Maybe colored sections would make a good Webstudio plugin.
@Bryan on a scale from 0 to 10, how big of a problem is this for you?
Getting-things-done scale: 1
Designer-itch scale: 4
alright, lets find a color that has as much contrast as possible without being annoying
on your screenshot its probably too light
oh actually I have a better solution
keep the color, just hide the lines when mouse is not hovering the navigator
Interesting idea. Thanks for considering this.
Seemingly unrelated:
A Focus Mode might help understand nesting better and could clean up the Navigator for the task at hand. One might have a look how Penpot does this

Screen 1: Overlapping items and nesting going on.
Screen 2: One Group picked in Navigator or on Canvas and Key F (Focus) pressed

This zooms to the selected items on screen and temporarily removes other items from the page-hierarchy. Pressing F again ends Focus Mode.
Attachments
2024-04-11_09h21_17.png
2024-04-11_09h21_41.png
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