KRISTOFFER.

New stuff for the default Tumblr theme:

Four different layouts: Regular, Minimal, Wide, and Grid. 

Highly readable reblogs: Same as in the dashboard. Goodbye, blockquotes. 

Unique widgets: Say more about yourself by sharing your likes and top photos. 

Design tweaks: Little details that make the whole thing better.

As always, your header image, fonts, and colors will automatically match up across the default theme, the dashboard, and the app. How you look is how you look, everywhere.

One more thing: We changed the name of the default theme from “Optica” to “Official,” which makes much more sense. If you’re already using Official, you’ll be automatically updated (as long as you haven’t tweaked the theme code). If you’re not using it…

You asked for it. Here it comes. Messaging. Real, threaded, instant messaging. It’s in the latest Android and iOS apps, and on the web.

Yep: Now you can talk to a Tumblr.

This is a big launch, and it’s going to take a few weeks to get it out to everyone (we need to make sure our servers can handle the weight of your discourse). If you don’t have it now, you’ll have it soon.

Q: So, how can I tell if I have messaging?

A: Great question. If you see this smiley balloon hanging out on your screen…

…you’ve got messaging. If you message someone, they’ll get messaging. Eventually, messaging will cover the earth.

Q: What if I have other Q’s? What if I have A’s, even?

Nice new thing for the web: You can have your post pages show related posts from the rest of your Tumblr. Yes, give passers-by a sense of your whole oeuvre from a single post.

Need an example? Okay, okay. Assuming you’re on the web right now, check out this old staff post. See?

If you’re using the default theme (Optica), it’ll be on by default. If it bugs you, you can turn off it in your theme customization panel.

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.