I don’t have access and haven’t been using Tana, so my comments are based on what I see in the videos.
The UI looks a lot like Notion to me. I don’t hate it, but I have a lot of problems with parts of the UI and some of the overall UX in Notion. (However, I’ll keep discussion focused on aethetics.)
The tight spacing of the notes in the dashboard are contributing to its clunky, developer-designed look. Some people will enjoy everything tightly packed to save space because that works for their brains.
But others like me prefer more breathing space (minimum 1.2 line spacing and minimum .8 line height between items). Otherwise, our brains look at that wall of text and just want to shut down the app and not look at it again. For example, having list items compacted into a single paragraph text is horrible for me (looking at the video on https://tana.inc/pkm).
On a desktop or iPad, I would prefer things to be more scannable rather than space saving. Maybe on a phone, the space saving would be better, but then, I would never look at something like this on my phone—it would irritate me too much to have too small a view.
(On the other hand, a mindmap view, despite the mess of linking lines would be far preferable to me. But this is another thread.)
Will there be options to change the fonts? The spacing?
My gut feeling is the other thing that makes it look “cheap” is the use of emoji icons. For a certain demographic, these are normal and not a problem. As a designer, though, I find it looks juvenile and lacks cohesion. The emojis don’t all have the same modelling, design style, and the colour palette is “everything” which means they all stand out without any one being able to stand out. I would prefer custom icons that match and cohere together, the ability to upload my own, or the ability to disable them altogether (because I don’t have access to the app yet, I can’t verify if these are already options).
Notion uses the same idea and when I see templates that use emojis, I don’t think of Notion as a serious tool for serioius users. I think of it as something students and hobbyists use to make simple databases. Now, Notion does have it’s own set of custom icons that cohere, so you don’t have to use emojis—plus you can upload your own.
I would have to use Tana before I could say more about aesthetics and my experience looking at it, though.
Just an heads up, the emojis you see is opted in by the user. The default design does not have any emojis to have the need to disable them. Either way, you can actually upload custom icons and have a more clean feel. You can check out this link: https://x.com/dreetje/status/1794254964187169203