Critique please .. my new blog design.
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- The Phoenix
- Forum Contributor
- Posts: 294
- Joined: Fri Oct 06, 2006 8:12 pm
I disagree in general, but there are some areas you could tweak to get a better look, while keeping the feel.xpgeek wrote:But design is ugly, sorry IMHO.
Authors of design have to work much more.
First, the header is enourmous, and its not text. I can see the desire for the reflected text over the background, but then just make the text into the image, and use the rest as a background graphic. But shrink it considerably. Its 1024x156, and it could easily be more like 400x80. That would give far more real-estate to the content - always a good thing.
I actually like the darker purple below the logo for the strong contrast, and I suspect if the logo was shrunk down to a height of 80 or so, it wouldn't be so overwhelming to others.
Personally, I like the color scheme, the style, and the layout. I might change the size of the columns a bit, but it depends on the size of the monitor. I suspect its a good mix for most sizes as is.
I think its a solid design, just needs some tweaks. Far from "much work to do".
That's about where I place it, too. Some quite good features, a few I don't particularly like. No problem with the purple, but I agree that the header could be considerably shallower, unless you're planning to add more up there. The striped lower background is good. I have the feeling that the font size is too large, generally. I think I read that you want the font-size to be user adjustable for accessibility; that's good, but I would suggest the initial default should be a smaller font. I'm guessing that your left hand column will be populated dynamically. Maybe I'm the last one to know this, but the colored arrows next to each item in the right hand column convey nothing whatsoever to me. Will they be expanding sub-menus?
This isn't particularly obvious, that's true. The arrows represent the movement of a score value. The idea of the site is to quantify the effectiveness of elected members of government. They're rated based on a large number of things, and all those scores are aggregated into a single score value. The arrow indicates whether the MP (Member of Parliament) is doing a better or worse job than the previous week. On the version I'm working on here they have a tooltip saying something like "Score fell 5 points to 10,605". The closest analogy I can think of is a sports league table.califdon wrote:Maybe I'm the last one to know this, but the colored arrows next to each item in the right hand column convey nothing whatsoever to me. Will they be expanding sub-menus?
- RobertGonzalez
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- Location: Fremont, CA, USA
- RobertGonzalez
- Site Administrator
- Posts: 14293
- Joined: Tue Sep 09, 2003 6:04 pm
- Location: Fremont, CA, USA
Purple is the "royal" color, Everah! It adds dignity!Everah wrote:Still purply, but cool, in my opinion.
Wow! I would never have guessed what those arrows mean, although I can see it now. Yeah, I think you really need to have a small legend that explains that. I understand that you're trying to settle the larger items first, just don't forget to provide space for it.
- gregwhitworth
- Forum Commoner
- Posts: 53
- Joined: Tue Oct 09, 2007 1:00 am
- Location: Wasilla, Alaska
What I think....
Overall - it is a well accomplished CSS site, but I do feel there are some things that could make the design more user friendly. What I mean by that is, you could throw the nav underneath the logo filling in that space (fixing that problem) and making it more obvious where the nav is. Next, I would add about a 15px margin to the top and bottom of the html tag:
This would give some space, but overall I like the concept - and in the end you will never appease everyone - but keep up the good work.
--
Greg
Code: Select all
html {
margin: 15px 0;}--
Greg