On Sep 27, 2006, at 7:45 PM, Steven Peck wrote:
The big blue bar on top does nothing for the theme except push down the title bar and drown the rest of the site. No matter how I try I can't look away. As I try and look down the page, my eye is constantly drawn to the big huge empty dominating color bar on top.
<design-by-committee> i totally agree w/ steven. on a full-height window on my 15" powerbook, nearly the top 1/4 of the screen is taken up by navigational cruft that could easily fit into 1/8th of the screen instead (if not less). there's *tons* of wasted screen real estate here. you end up with an amazingly low % of the screen that contains any content. edward tufte[1] would (rightfully) go to town on this theme (and many others in drupal-land) about how ineffective it is at presenting any useful info to the user of the site. we're writing a content management system, after all, the content should be the most important part... others will probably scream that i should take my minimalist, tufte- compliant theme ideas and a) go to hell and b) stay away from the default core theme which has to "look slick". i disagree. just because it looks slick doesn't mean you have to water down the screen with pixels that add no information, or lots of empty space... if i had the first clue about writing a theme[2], and if i wasn't so damn busy on other things, i'd write my own theme that a) looks good and b) gives you access to your content, not tons of navigational cruft and other things eating up the majority of the screen and screaming for your undeserved attention. </design-by-committee> no offense to trae or farsheed -- much thanks for all the work they've already put into this. and, no offense to anyone else who's really into the tons-of-pixels-that-convey-no-information approach to themes. i just wish more of the theme/design folks around here would drink from the tufte kool-aid. ;) -derek [1] http://edwardtufte.com (no, i don't think his site is The Best (tm) possible site, and that's not what i mean by a "tufte-compliant theme", though he sure packs a ton of useful info, graphics and links onto each square cm of the page. it's more about taking his ideas about visuallly displaying data and applying those to a drupal theme, not writing a theme to duplicate the look/feel of his site). [2] i'm hoping to attend the lullabot theme workshop in SF next week to work on this deficiency of mine.