Dries Buytaert wrote:
Hello world,
is there someone else who likes?
http://www.drupalart.org/drupal48/ http://drupal.org/node/81217
Personally, I think it makes for the best candidate so far. It looks like bluemarine's pretty sister, and is what I had in mind.
Let's avoid talking about the underlying XHTML/CSS: we'll worry about that in step #2. Instead, let's talk about the aesthetics, the brand and the message this theme communicates. On a scale from 1-5 (1 = "Argh, it hurts my eyes", 3 = "I can live with it", 5 = "Exactly what we need"), what rating would you give this design (not its XHTML/CSS) and why? I'll rate it 3.1, marginally better than what we have now.
The problem I have with the aesthetics of the color scheme and brand is that it's a washed-out blue, make me think of a ten year old car that was a pretty blue when new, but has spent too much time in the sun, thus fading into old age. The tan line on the logo just makes this worse. It's a color scheme that only works for jeans, but I don't see Drupal acquiring a denim-textured background image. One low-level point that I have yet to see anyone raise is the use of boldface for the links in the sidebars. The purpose of boldface is to stand out from surrounding text, which is pointless if there is no surrounding text (as on the left sidebar). The boldface is harder to read (fonts are tuned for their normal weight, not bold), looks like crayon (i.e. targeted to children), and causes the navigation menus to take up too much vertical space, reducing what appears above the fold (a real problem on the handbook pages). I'm not fond of bold face in any case - it reminds me of trashy junk mail -- but at least it's somewhat justifiable in the center content. I can't see any justification for it in the sidebars. (If I could make one, and only one change to the Drupal.org style sheet today, it would be to add ".sidebar a { font-weight: normal;}".) On the plus side, I like the simplicity and the cleanness. The headers feel like they have the have the right size ration compared to the ordinary text, Verdana is much easier to read (especially for proofreading), justified text is easier to read (though they take more effort), the layout spacing is good, though the spacing between elements doesn't get the affinities right. May I suggest replacing the Latin with something that most of us could read for real? Perhaps copying some text from the handbook? The Latin Lorem tradition seems to come from the school of thought that's more concerned with the high level visual design than with other usability factors like readability. English text would make it easier to judge the readability of the design. Just my $0.02, Gary