Dark Sidebar Menus with White Icons and Text
This week a friend commented to me that too many user interfaces look like WordPress.
That’s crazy talk, I thought, until I started Googling around. Almost every open source project I looked at seemed to use a dark sidebar menu with white icons and text. WordPress didn’t start this design pattern, but they certainly popularized it.
Here are some of the admin area design for about 20 non-WordPress open source projects.
Magento
OpenCart
Prestashop
October CMS
Sylius
Tuleap
Subrion
AdminLTE
Grav
Lara
Dungeon
Mura
CouchCMS
Perfecto
Orchard
UI CMS
Mezzanine
Over to you
I’m not doing this to pick on any of the platforms listed here, so much as to say that open source UI seems to be stuck in a rut.
If you know of any examples of fresh or creative admin interfaces, please let me know in the comments.
Drupal 8 is different 😉
Seriously, I think the color style is not that much important, and a menubar alone does not represent the entire UI. It’s more about functionality and behavior. Drupal 8 might not win any “design-awards”, but I like the feature to switch between vertical and horizontal orientation. Pretty unique.
In general, I think a dark UI is more eye-friendly. Personally I would prefer a good dark-colored scheme in any CMS… unfortunately there aren’t (m)any.
Maybe Grav? That does have a dark UI as default
Yes, I tried it… but I won’t use it. Grav UI colors are not bad. Especially the “cooler” and “blue-ish” dark-grey. Other products tend to use a very warm grey, which does not fit with the rest! Even a 100% black would be better 😉 An exception is Magento, which used beige and light brown colors from the beginning.
BTW, [url=http://Creative-Tim.com]Creative-Tim.com[/url] has some interesting admin dashboards and UI Kit designs. Lite and even with colors. Fresh and friendly.
Thank you for sharing the link with us
I know I am way late to the party on this post, but I see (and usually like) the left side bar in non cms websites I use. I know Garmin (GPS and tracking watches) has a left sidebar and it works very well.
Stuck in a rut? Or using what works well (I vote the latter).