[Theforum] Redesign

A. Erickson amanda at gawow.com
Tue Apr 9 12:23:50 CDT 2002


http://members.evolt.org/isaac/evolt/redesign3.gif

> To Javier,
>
> > what are those white boxes above the highlited article for?
> (sorry if
> > you've explained before)
>
> Promo spaces for highlighting new features or things like
> "Ask a question on thelist", or "submit an article", "buy a
> mousepad", etc. Not too garish, but something that still gets
> attention. Hopefully we can have easy "[x]" (Switch this
> feature off, I've already bought a mousepad!) preference settings too.

I feel like that should go below the latest article. Also, how likely is
it that we'll have an image to go along with the article theme. I like
the idea but that seems a bit unweildy. (Unless you have a default image
for each category but that could offend/confuse some people.)

> > the black menu looks much more prominent than the top menu, my
> > impression is that we need to make the (articles | browsers
> | lists |
> > etc) menu more visible
>
> Yeh, I haven't done that bit there at all. They do need to
> stand out. Let me know if you have any ideas.

Hmmmm... Overall, visually, I'm having trouble focussing on specific
elements. Everything seems to be getting roughly the same weight except
for the left-hand nav which just disappears for me. (Also, what is "news
and articles" at the top left is that the current location?)

As for what to do... I would pull out browsers, tips, lists, directory,
members, food and put that elsewhere with expanded descriptions. I know
that those are main categories of evolt stuff but they look really
incongruous and I'm not sure why they are given such prominence.

What happens if the blue divider is removed from between the top portion
and the black nav bar?

Shouldn't search be above log-in? Once you've logged in, if you click
"remember me" then you are going to be most interested in searching when
you come to the site.

Maybe I could play with the elements a bit? Let me know if that's coolio
or if you have another draft in the works.

Also, is there a list of features/issues that we're tackling here. (I'm
very sorry if this has been hashed, I am a bit lost at the moment.)

> > i don't understand the logic of the elements in the black menu

Me neither. I can see where it's going, sort of, but I'm not sure it's
there yet.

> OK, the black bar pertains directly to the subsite.

Subsite?

> So for
> the frontdoor of www.evolt.org, it'd link to article
> submission, about info, contact info, etc. While the black
> bar for FEO would have "submit a recipe", etc. For MEO it'd
> have the key things like "Support MEO", "Getting an account",
> "Member of the week", etc.

Hm.

But you're also doing a "you are here" thing in that black bar, right?
Or is "news and articles" pertaining to evolt as a whole?

> > i like the return of the categories menu!
>
> I thought that we could highlight (bold, darker colour or
> something) categories that have recent articles, or have lots
> of articles, etc. What do you think? It's an old idea I read
> on asktog once, where he talked about having folder icons
> that got cobwebs as they were neglected, and looked aged if
> they were older projects, etc. Kinda cool thinking for regular users.

I do like that. You could just do a little thing underneath each one
like so:
	Visual Design
	(6 new)

Cookies, baby!


> Not necessarily, (remember that I'll be dropping the dotted
> lines to avoid Rudy crying in pain), but it'll be up to
> thesite re implementation anyway.

I think they're cute. Isn't cute what we're going for? I'm pretty sure
in our mission statement (correct me if I'm wrong) that evolt.org is
dedicated to serving the web development community and to look cute
while doing it. Yep, I'm looking right here at my manual and there's an
amendment added last spring while the crocuses were blooming.

- amanda




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