[Actionchix] Simpler designs

[Akkana Peck]

Terri Oda writes (about orange-cleaner):
> - I did the "everything's in a big box and we don't use the whole page" 
> thing that's fairly frequently used in modern web design.  I used a bit 
> more screen real estate than, say, yahoo does, but it should give you 
> the idea.

I prefer using the whole page, but this one uses most of the page
so it doesn't look as obviously weird as the really narrow ones --
and it still seems to scale with page width, even to very narrow
browser widths, which is great.

However, on my default size (800px width), the unused margin is
significantly bigger on the left than the right, which looks
weird and out of balance.

I like the orange color accents contrasting with cool blue, but
the blue is so grey that the page ends up not having much color
and looking a little bland to me. That might also be partly due
to the lack of a contrasting-color sidebar or top titlebar.

I like the penguin being on the right so it doesn't take away from
the sidebar menus, and I like all the space available for content.

Mary Gardiner writes:
> On Sun, Jul 02, 2006, Terri Oda wrote:
> > - I find 10pt a bit small, but it *is* pretty common.
> 
> I would prefer in the final design if we did not specify a default font
> size (although I realise some designs may rely on it): I just wanted
> people to consider that their default large fonts may distort their
> impressions of things.

I agree. I don't have a problem with making a 10pt version for
people to compare with other pages, but I hope we won't force point
size in the final result. My mom uses the linuxchix site sometimes,
and there's no way she could read 10pt font.

Clytie Siddall writes:
> push the news text down quite a bit, so I suggest we have news links  
> (in orange?) part-way down under the left-hand navbar, so people know  
> what's down the page and don't miss it. My viewport shows down to the  
> heading for the FLOSSPOLS part, no further. I would be missing good  
> stuff if I closed the window without paging down, and I often do  

At 800x600 I don't see anywhere near that much: I only see down to
the end of the Gnome Women's Summer Outreach news item.

I didn't see that as much of a problem, though, since I could see
the "what is linuxchix?" summary and the first news item. I know
there's no way with a "news on the front page" design that I'm going
to see *all* the news items, and that's okay with me.

However, news links on the left would be fine -- paralleled
by other pages having links relevant to the content of that page.
(Maybe as part of the "expanding menus" Chris talked about.)

On some of Terri's other designs:

I find I don't like any of the ones with the penguin in the left
sidebar. Not because it doesn't look good there, but because it's
just too tall and takes too much real estate away from the
navigation.  Aside from that, I like all the designs, but since
Terri asked for more specific comments:

index-bars looks businesslike but not very fun. The navigation
buttons at the top wrap -- Resources is under Chapters rather than
next to it, but there's a lot of unused space to the left of News
so they all could have been shifted over. Looks like the left padding
of the buttons' container assumes a wide viewport or a small font size?

In index-blue-top I really like the contrasting title bar and the
way the logo spills up into that bar (but still contrasts nicely).
And there's lots of room for content. The only thing I don't like
about this one is that the titlebar blue is so dark that I can't
easily read the black "LinuxChix" title against it. White might
be more visible, but if the blue color is right in between so it's
monitor dependant, we could always do a fade so it's lighter
or darker on the left where the title is.

I also really like index-blue -- very sharp and clean looking, yet
different enough (because of the big bold left nav) to draw
attention.  And that logo is a lot shorter so it's okay in the
sidebar like that. But it would look even better with some orange
accents like the ones on orange-cleaner.

-- 
	...Akkana
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