[joakim ximian com: Re: Nav bar background image specs]

[Joakim Ziegler <joakim ximian com>]

I forgot to send this to the list.

----- Forwarded message from Joakim Ziegler <joakim ximian com> -----

Date: Fri, 9 Mar 2001 12:38:46 -0600
From: Joakim Ziegler <joakim ximian com>
To: digitect <digitect mindspring com>
Subject: Re: Nav bar background image specs
X-Mailer: Mutt 1.0.1i

On Fri, Mar 09, 2001 at 07:56:27AM -0500, digitect wrote:

> 1.
> I was going to pre-process some of the nav bar background images I've
> been finding. No flattening, effects or exact cropping, just assembling
> some high color strips that could be refined at a later date.

> Joakim, since you did the original comp, do you have any notion about
> height and widths for these? I don't want to cut them up to the precise
> size yet, but the proportion is generally important.

The images are roughly 600-700 pixels wide, and 50 pixels high. The leftmost
350 pixels are the most visible, ideally the interesting, identifying details
should fall into the leftmost 250 pixels or so.

For each image, it'd be good to also identify a color it looks good when
faded out to.


> I'm assuming the left side cell has the image, and the right side (or
> middle and right) cells have some sort of stretched image/background
> color beneath the links to make up the rest of the table width. How wide
> would the image be before those started?

> I'd also be curious about initial thoughts on how to overlap the
> background, the text links, and the gnome toe. I'm guessing the toe is
> part of the image so that the text can be right justified. But then
> there's got to be some sort of a cell split so that the left-hand half
> of the image can remain proportional while the right-hand stretches to
> fill. In the comps, it also seems the links need to start a new cell,
> too, but at a different place than the image splice. Does anyone have an
> elegant solution to this short of some fancy interplay of document
> background image, table background image, and a CSS z-index thing?

You're making it a little more complex than it is. Here's a tarball of a very
quick html version, the version that would be for Netscape 4. It's *really*
easy to do in CSS, but it seems to me your questions are about the Non-CSS
version: http://www.avmaria.com/gnome-html.tar.gz


> 2.
> Were we still looking at the possibility of dynamically delivering these
> images? Each visit to the site could be fresh, even if each section had
> a simple recognizable theme (content or color) to govern what was
> delivered and assist the site maintainers.

> I also like how this expresses the flexibility built into the GNOME
> desktop. We could do clever things like have Grayscale week, Cartoon
> week, theme to any holiday or season, or re-theme around a new release.

> Not that I'm proposing we start out with a million images, or even more
> than one per section for now. But it would be good to build this
> flexibility into the delivery system for enhancements down the road.

Yeah, it's fairly easy to build for this. We can just use a theme prefix
thing, so each theme has a canonical name, and build around that. Pretty
trivial.

-- 
Joakim Ziegler - Ximian web monkey - joakim ximian com - Radagast IRC
  FIX sysop - free software coder - FIDEL & Conglomerate developer
         http://www.avmaria.com/ - http://www.ximian.com/

----- End forwarded message -----

-- 
Joakim Ziegler - Ximian web monkey - joakim ximian com - Radagast IRC
  FIX sysop - free software coder - FIDEL & Conglomerate developer
         http://www.avmaria.com/ - http://www.ximian.com/