Bug#612208: review of the new website style
Package: www.debian.org
Severity: minor
Hello,
first of all, thanks for the huge work involved in taking control of the
website layout, and across so many parts of the Debian web ecosystem.
That was impressive work!
There are a few minor issues I noticed in the new website design that I
thought of collecting here. I'm doing it in the hope it can be useful,
but I don't dare opening a new bug report for every one of them unless
you tell me to, and I really don't mind if you just say "meh" and close
this bug.
Here's the list of issues I noticed:
* The news and other prime time links end up way down in the screen.
This may be because I have a 12" widescreen laptop display which is
wide and short, the screenshot is at http://store.enricozini.org/debianorg.png
On the other hand, text that runs the full width of the page tends to
give me a headache as I read it.
With widescreen displays becoming more and more like the standard, I
feel like it may make sense to chop some space on the side to use for
links, although looking at the new design I have the feeling that
removing the sidebar was an explicit choice, so never mind.
* The gradient behind the top left swirl logo does not match the
gradient of the rest of the top part. The difference between the two
is especially visible after the 'n' in 'debian' just below the swirl.
* I see no reason why having a white margin below the top left swirl
logo: it gives me the feeling of a layout problem rather than an
explicit choice.
* Alignment is an issue throughout the whole home page. If you draw a
vertical line anywhere through the page, you don't see any two
consecutive text objects that will align to it. The overall feeling
is of confusion and untidyness rather than elegange.
* There is no alignment at all on the right margin, either: justifying
the introduction text at the top instead of having it left-aligned
makes already a great difference. Making ul#hometoc-cole and the
sponsor link right-aligned also makes quite a difference.
* "Getting started", "News" and "Security advisories" here occupy only
the left half of the screen, and seem to call for a two-column
layout.
* The "Getting started", "News" and "Security advisories" titles don't
differentiate enough, graphically, from the rest of the body text,
and they appear to me as just a slightly bigger body text. A quick
stab at making them serif and bold, for example, gives a much clearer
graphical distinction.
* In "News" and "Security advisories", the monospace dates feel odd to
me. Partly because they are not aligned together with the title, nor
indented enough to make the lack of alignment look intentional. And
partly because of the subtle font change, from a fixed-width sans to
a proportional sans, which again isn't quite the same but isn't that
different either.
The square brackets in the dates also don't quite work for me: the
distinction between the date and the headline can be rendered with a
sharp distinction in font size, and colour, for example. The dates
can use a proportional font, too, and alignment can be achieved by
other means. The Google News search results can be an example of
timestamped entries with tidy alignments and clear graphical
distinction between the various elements.
It must be that years ago I've read a cute book indroducing some
typographic rules[1] and my mind's been corrupted since then.
Ciao,
Enrico
[1] http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=n1AuwXafMO8C&printsec=frontcover&dq=the+non+designer's+design+book
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 6.0
APT prefers stable
APT policy: (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.32-5-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
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