Refreshed Interface

Come over to the dark side, sort of. We have just released an update that refreshes the Shard Tabletop user experience. Our focus has always been around trying to provide great, easy-to-use tools. Over the years, we have made lots of functionality changes to make Shard easier to use and more functional. The general look hasn’t changed much though. There have been lots of discussions over the years about the desire to make the UI more appealing, but we have never been sure exactly how to do that. We finally decided that we would make some changes, even if they aren’t earth-shattering. Hopefully you will find the new UI to be an improvement! Read on below to learn more.

Dark Pages

While the default light background makes reading large blocks of text easier, it doesn’t work as well with some of the graphics and navigation pages. The main Shard pages are now dark rather than light. The light background is used for books and other text-heavy sections. Of course, if you prefer dark everywhere, Dark Mode is still supported (see Account Page).

Updated Fonts

The original fonts were selected to be similar to the fonts from books. The challenge here is that those are not the easiest to read on screens, especially smaller ones like phones, or for some people that have difficulty reading serif fonts. The new font is all Arial, which is very readable. The font size has generally increased as well. This helps readability as well as making things a bit easier to click since they are larger.

Character Sheet

Even before increasing the font size there were many cases where the character sheet did not work well in small spaces. Some of the tables could even be too large and require horizontal scaling. The character sheet now adjusts sizes better and reorganizes information to virtually eliminate the overflow.

More Graphics

There are just many cases where it is easier to spot and find things based on pictures. The menus to browse and select monsters now show the tokens by default to take advantage of the images.

Guided Tours

Shard now has a lot more features than when we started. We have also discovered that Shard works a bit differently than other VTTs. The small helper text distributed around the interface aren’t very attractive and don’t provide enough help. Most of those text helpers have been removed or reduced. In their place, Shard now has “tours” to help learn how to use the interface.

Update (11/24/2024)

Based on feedback around the new font we extended the UI refresh to allow a user config setting to pick the font. On the account page you can choose the default font used across Shard. Additionally the character sheet theme now allows you to set the font that is used on the character sheet. These should allow people to pick the font that works best while using Shard.

Hopefully these changes will make it easier and more fun to use Shard for both new and old users. As always, let us know what you think.