Re: header attempts

[Charles Goodwin <charlie xwt org>]

On Thu, 2004-02-05 at 00:07, Oliver Burnett-Hall wrote:
> Not a bad start.  Certainly better than anything I could do (but I am
> about the least talented artist around).  But here are a few semi-random
> thoughts:

Thanks for the feedback. :)

> The second two I'm not keen on as I don't think the feet work as either
> 'G' or 'O'.  Not sure about the coloured toes either.

Well, yeah, that's been mentioned.  I think the coloured toes just imply
it's office-like because, well, MS Office adopts a colour-scheme like
that.  I think it's quite a subtle, successful hint personally.

Anyway, the logo is easy to replace once somebody creates something
better.

> On a more general note, I'm not a fan of banner type logos.  They mean
> that you have to give the page a fixed width, which means you're losing
> stuff off the side if the user has a narrow window, and not making full
> use of the space if they've got a wide one.

Not in a well designed header.  If you have it blending into a smooth
colour or repeating image, there is no limit to the width of the page. 
This is a common approach, seen on the current gnome.org pages.

> give the whole of the page header a background using CSS.

...exactly:
http://www.charlietech.com/goffice/index.html

Note that this is a WIP because I don't like how the left-blue contrasts
with the clouds.  It looks a little dirty.

> Having said that, I do like the blue background effect you've got; maybe
> this in a vertical stripe could be used as a sidebar background (though
> you then get problems with differing font sizes, but I'm trying not to
> get carried away like that - I've a tendency to end up with graphic-free
> web pages if I'm not careful).

Graphic free pages are good. ;)  I like to minimise the use of graphics.

Also, half the point of CSS is to get around the whole 'font resizing'
issues that people constantly encounter when doing gross nested-table
layouts.

> The biggest problem is the image size.  The existing logo on the website
> is 59kB and you've only shave a couple of K off of that.  Your target
> should be 5-6kB - reckon you can manage to do something that size?

Not to appear arrogant, but is that an issue?  As long as it's not
monstrous, I don't think we'll have much of an issue here.

Anyway, the problem with the previous headers is that they were pngs
where jpg would have given much better compression.  This is well
evidenced in that previous link which uses jpgs - they are 6k and 9k
totally 15k which I don't think is much to ask even for the poor sods
using modems.
-- 
- Charlie

The future of the net - www.xwt.org

Charles Goodwin <charlie xwt org>
  Member of the XWT Foundation