Design Suggestion: Zebra Striping

[PullJosh]

I know a lot of the design work for Scratch 3.0 happens here on Github, so I wanted to see if anyone had thoughts about zebra striping.

I made a forum post here describing the feature: https://scratch.mit.edu/discuss/topic/274523/

Mockups

Before: After:

Pros/Cons

Pros:

• Improves readability of code
• Preserves flat design of 3.0
• No drastic changes need to be made to current design spec
• Relatively easy to implement (I assume?)

Cons:

• It is possible that alternating colors could confuse new Scratchers into thinking that the blocks are from different palettes, when, in fact, they are the same.

[thisandagain]

Thanks for filing an issue @PullJosh. This is something we have discussed, but haven't been able to come to a conclusion on.

[ed-cooper]

Another pro which was mentioned before:

• Zebra striping makes it easier for people following tutorials to know when they've copied code incorrectly (as the zebra stripes won't match up)

[TheBrokenRail]

Here is a userscript that causes all reporters and C-Blocks to stripe on: http://llk.github.io/scratch-blocks/playgrounds/tests/vertical_playground.html

Download

Block Striping.user.zip

[Kenny2github]

I'll quickly post my forum post here too:

In 2.0, the gradients supposedly help separate blocks - but what about for colorblind users (like me)? It's actually much more difficult for me to see gradients - shades of the same color are not very different. Though zebra striping is also a shade change, it's not a gradient - there's no gradual change, it's a sudden BOOM and it's another shade. So zebra striping would help separate blocks more than the current 2.0 gradient does. Support.

[TheInitializer]

This has its pros and cons - the problem I see is that striped Control blocks might start to look more like Events blocks. This ties in nicely with LLK/scratch-blocks#995