[IAEP] wiki design

[Frederick Grose]

On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 12:03 PM, josh williams <josh at tucson-labs.com>wrote:

> From what I could gather, Bernie was just making suggestions for what a
> site wide navigation could look like. I actually like Bernie's idea of
> making it more like google's universal nav. I think something like the
> following would work well:
>
> Home    Wiki    Download    Activities    More >
>
> The more link would be a drop down of all our other sub domains.
>
> At any rate I'm almost done with http://wiki-devel.sugarlabs.org/ - so any
> information on how to edit the main navigation would be very helpful. We can
> push the changes without changing the main nav once I get finished bug
> checking, but I think leaving it as it is makes the wiki more confusing than
> it needs to be.
>
> --
> Josh
>

(Dropping systems@ and adding marketing@, as this is more of a design
discussion.)

Thank you Josh for your contributions to Sugar Labs!

I must admit that I would prefer to see a bit more of the Sugar style
elements maintained or added to the Sugar Labs wiki skin.

The proposed skin at http://wiki-devel.sugarlabs.org/ has lost many of the
style elements found in our product, Sugar, as expressed in The Sugar
Interface/Controls<http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Human_Interface_Guidelines/The_Sugar_Interface/Controls>.
In particular, the bold strokes of the Sugar icons on the tabs, the dark
background of the Sugar toolbar with gray-scale icons, and colors
holding special
meaning<http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Human_Interface_Guidelines/The_Sugar_Interface#Imbuing_Color_with_Meaning>
.

I like that the proposed skin includes the single-line logo (hoping also
that it can be placed so that it also works with the very common monobook
skin and others).

Among our sister sites, my favorites for header and navigation linkbars are
http://translate.sugarlabs.org/ and http://git.sugarlabs.org/ (primarily
because they both seem to use bold underline strokes on the event of mouse
pointer hover, and their dark backgrounds remind me of the Sugar toolbar).
 I'd prefer that the bright colors of links carry 'special meaning' by being
revealed on hover, indicating the appropriate time for user participation,
that is a click of a mouse button. The current header navigation links at
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/ and most of the current tab links have this
behavior, but need the bolder strokes and underscores of the translate and
git headers.  Having the  descender on the 'g' hang over the bottom of the
header area at the translate does add a bit of spice, even if it flirts with
the Marketing Team's Logo
guidelines<http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Marketing_Team/Logo>
.

In the content areas, to keep a clean, uncluttered, and easy-to-read page
(especially because of descenders on the typeface), I prefer to have the
underscores appear on links only when they are activated by mouse hover.  In
the proposed skin, compare, for example, the greater ease of reading those
links on the sidebar versus the links in the table of contents box.

Thank you for considering the thoughts and preferences I've presented
above.

           --Fred
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