Re: [Gimp-developer] SGO to WGO Transition

[Elle Stone <ellestone ninedegreesbelow com>]

On 11/23/2015 04:50 PM, Pat David wrote:
> Hi!
>
> On Mon, Nov 23, 2015 at 2:23 PM Elle Stone
> <ellestone ninedegreesbelow com <mailto:ellestone ninedegreesbelow com>>
> wrote:
>     Well, now I feel silly - other than Wilbur and the download icon, I
>     didn't realize that the items beside the other links were icons instead
>     of placeholders.
>
>
> Don't feel silly - you aren't the first to have this happen to them.
> Which leads me to looking sooner at addressing the issue...
>
>     Maybe the icons could be larger?
>
>     Would color instead of just black and white maybe help distinguish the
>     various icons, and also help better "brand" the GIMP website from one
>     page to the next?
>
>     Could the word "GIMP" and also the Wilber icon both be made a bit larger
>     and more prominent in the navigation bar?
>
>
> I'm fiddling with resizing those icons right now (as well as adding
> other icons to balance each link in that header navigation).
>
> If you had a choice, what size seems to work well for you?

I spent some time looking at home pages of websites for several major 
newspapers. I was surprised by the uniformity of the navigation/header 
area at the top:

* The row of navigation links are just word links, no icons.
* There's a large identifying icon, like Wilber is for GIMP, usually 
above and to the left.
* The newspaper name is in larger font usually above the row of links 
but sometimes to one side.

I'm not saying that GIMP's website should match those large commercial 
websites just because they are large commercial websites.

But it *might* be worth experimenting with eliminating the icons from 
the navigation bar, and just using them in the footer navigation. That 
would make the row of links in the header navigation bar less crowded 
and allow room for a larger Wilbur icon.

Reserving the navigation icons for the footer navigation would allow for 
larger icons without making the footer navigation seem crowded.

> I can certainly play with color too.  I don't think we have an
> "official" color scheme just yet for branding, but I'll see what
> everyone else thinks too.
>
>
>     Points of perspective:
>
>     * Not everyone has great eyesight.
>
>
> What do you do on pages that are rendering fonts small?  Everything
> _should_ scale ok if you zoom the page in.  (This is not an excuse for
> the small icons, just a thought).

On websites that still think 10-12px font sizes are sufficient for 
readability, I zoom in until the text is readable. On websites that 
think there's no such thing as a line of text that's too long, or think 
lines of text don't need any separation, I make the viewport narrower 
and zoom in. On some websites I just give up and disable their styling 
through the browser.

On your redesign of the GIMP website, you already use very nicely sized 
fonts and good line spacing and line lengths, so I don't have to do any 
zooming at all.

Speaking of zooming in and/or making viewports smaller, your home page 
design for the GIMP website very nicely flows and rearranges itself when 
the page is zoomed in and/or resized even to narrow widths.

>     * At least on my screen, those icons are small and not very
>     differentiated one from the other.
>
>
>     * Properly used, color helps make things more distinguishable, as well
>     helps to establish "yes, you are still on the same website".
>
>     * A larger Wilbur in the navigation bar would be *very* nice. A more
>     prominent placement of the word "GIMP" in the navigation bar, emphasized
>     by some appropriate color scheme, also would help.
>
>
> Let's see what we can do with fiddling with sizes and colors.  I'm open
> to suggestions as well! :)

What color scheme will the GIMP 2.10 release use?

Best,
Elle