It's been 2 weeks since my last update and wow, has it been busy.

After my proposal had its funding paused, it took a bit of time to rally the community and get us back above the Return Proposal. A big thank you to everybody who took the time to vote, some setting me as their Voting Proxy and also making your opinions known. Sometimes, the negative voices are the loudest so it was great to see and feel so much support.

Professional Design Input

One thing that I learnt from the recent criticism is that the "level of polish" isn't good enough and that I should "get input from a designer". So, I've been in touch with some old colleagues and have acquired the services of one of the best designers that I've ever worked with. It'll cost a bit of moolah but so far, it's definitely been worth it!

The design of the overlay / lightbox has improved significantly as a result, going from what I shared in my last update:

to a more polished and in my opinion, far superior design:

Lightbox Updates

It's not only the design that has had an overhaul. I've also reworked how the images open and how the zooming works - implementing the addition of scroll wheel functionality to zoom in and zoom out.

In my opinion, this is the most significant update since the Navigation Update 9 months ago.

I'm very pleased with the outcome but given how significant the changes are, and how many different approaches there are to uploading images, with existing links surrounding them, I ask...

Please spend some time using steemitdev.com to test it

Updated Navigation

I've already mentioned the navigation and I've made an adjustment to the positioning of "Explore communities". This was contained within "My Subscriptions" which has always felt a bit hidden. I have also spent some time with my designer looking at the "logged out" state and it makes sense for the communities to be more prominent within this too.

So I've moved this section up a level so that's it's visible under "Explore" (see screenshot to the right). This is also visible when logged out.

The communities list will definitely need a redesign soon!

Ukrainian Language

A big Thank You to the Ukrainian Community for testing the language translation and to @o1eh for collating feedback.

We've also been working on producing a Press Release that will be shared with Ukraine's primary crypto site (https://incrypted.com/ua/novyny/) which gives us a great opportunity for onboarding a nation of people and also investors.

Since we'll only get one shot at this, I ask that all Ukrainians continue to test steemitdev.com and highlight any content that's not user generated, that appears in English.

It has been an extremely busy 2 weeks and also an extremely productive one. I'm so pleased to have the additional design input, which will take Steemit.com up to a level that I wouldn't have been capable of alone.

And I won't get complacent about votes. If you haven't already done so, please support this proposal.