Anki’s card templates are appropriate defaults, but I wish they were more interesting and readable. Other users’ designs were either too complicated or error-prone for my taste. So I made my own.
My designs are just a little bit better. They’re simple and fit seamlessly with Anki’s defaults. But I tweaked them according to design best practices to be more pleasant and readable across platforms. I also have special templates for equations and coding.
You can find them in the Better Designed Card Templates shared deck. Would love to hear if like them, or would like me to change them.
If you’re interested, someone recently also shared a way to have markdown support with minimal setup. They might help with the coding cards as you don’t need to copy the syntax highlighting.
The default needed to be simple and also resilient against errors but that also makes it really unappealing. There was a suggestion floating around to change it and I remember both of those points were brought up.
But your code for the most part is simple and beautiful (the styling for hr, left-aligned text, the padding, more readable line-height). So hopefully, we can change the defaults to something better in the future.
I was terse with how I described the defaults. They’re appropriate for the reasons you note and because they make editing the CSS approachable. But, yeah, the tweaks you mention might still meet those requirements.
And–whoa–I would never have found that markdown solution!
As has been mentioned above, the default templates use very simple styling, to make it easier for people not familiar with HTML/CSS to modify the basics like font size and color. I took a brief peek at your first template, and while you’ve tried to keep things simple, it still has about 5x the amount of CSS, which I think is going to be a fair bit more daunting for people not familiar with it.
One possible way we could work around this is to make some of the styling implicit and not explicitly shown in the template. But doing so would make it harder to discover the things that had been tweaked, and has the potential to cause disruption to existing card templates.
