reimplementation of the new design (Pierre Schmitz)
 

On Jan 17, 2008 9:00 AM PST, Pierre Schmitz <pierre@archlinux.de> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> the last few days I have been working on implementation of the new design for
> archlinux.de. This might be interesting for some of you; especially for those
> who maintain other arch sites.
>
> I have simplified the css and html code. There were some strange and useless
> parts (like the background image to draw those two bars at the top)

Good job, I know it needs it. I am not going to worry about this for
now, because there are "changes in the works" that may make this
irrelevant.

> I have modified the logo: I removed the hard to read TM (isn't this useless
> anyway) and change the font from liberation to dejavu because of hinting
> errors. Furthermore I used Gimp instead of Inkscape to create the png which
> results in a much sharper output. Finally I used optipng to make all pngs
> smaller. :-)

I will stay clear of the trademark debate, but with respect to the
sub-text under the logo, this is simply a matter of preference. The old
logo did not use antialiasing, while the new one does. Some may argue
that means the new logo is broken--I disagree. Most professional logos
use antialiased fonts for text. I agree that Inkscape's font rendering
isn't the best, but personally I don't care for the ultra-crisp version
at the DE site either, but to each their own.

> I created the MediaWiki theme from scratch. Its based on the monobook theme
> but I left the original css files untouched. Instead I wrote a new
> archlinux.css which just overrides some box positions and colours to our
> needs. This should make upstream updates much easier. In the past some
> updates were a lot of work because of many changes to the css code. And of
> course: Its much easier to maintain only the changes in a separate file.

The work you did on the wiki looks great...if I could offer one
suggestion it would be to make sure the links are not the same colour as
the headings.

> I have changed some colours compared to the theme from archlinux.org (grey
> boxes on the start page and using grey and blue for the wiki)

Overall, I think you have some great ideas about separating the styles
from the upstream content/themes--we plan to do the same for the
official site. The current state of the official site is definitely in
transition--we mainly want to get the new logo into circulation at this
point. The 'refinement' is coming...

I think a LOT of css (and even some semantic markup) can be removed from
the official Arch sites, but I just came on board and until we have a
clear vision as to what we're going to accomplish, I don't want waste
what precious the other web devs have.

Kudos for doing such a good job on the DE site!

reimplementation of the new design (Pierre Schmitz)
 

Am Donnerstag, 17. Januar 2008 20:34:28 schrieb thayer:
> I will stay clear of the trademark debate, but with respect to the
> sub-text under the logo, this is simply a matter of preference. The old
> logo did not use antialiasing, while the new one does. Some may argue
> that means the new logo is broken--I disagree. Most professional logos
> use antialiased fonts for text. I agree that Inkscape's font rendering
> isn't the best, but personally I don't care for the ultra-crisp version
> at the DE site either, but to each their own.

You are right. Fonts should be antialiased. And on the de-logo I enabled
antialiasing and hinting. I only switched the Font to dejavu because
liberation had some strange hinting on smaller sizes.

>
> > I created the MediaWiki theme from scratch. Its based on the monobook
> > theme but I left the original css files untouched. Instead I wrote a new
> > archlinux.css which just overrides some box positions and colours to our
> > needs. This should make upstream updates much easier. In the past some
> > updates were a lot of work because of many changes to the css code. And
> > of course: Its much easier to maintain only the changes in a separate
> > file.
>
> The work you did on the wiki looks great...if I could offer one
> suggestion it would be to make sure the links are not the same colour as
> the headings.

You are right. Among some other colour-changes I switched the heading to a
darker grey.

>
> > I have changed some colours compared to the theme from archlinux.org
> > (grey boxes on the start page and using grey and blue for the wiki)
>
> Overall, I think you have some great ideas about separating the styles
> from the upstream content/themes--we plan to do the same for the
> official site. The current state of the official site is definitely in
> transition--we mainly want to get the new logo into circulation at this
> point. The 'refinement' is coming...

OK, perhaps we could coordinate this a bit. If wanted I could try to make
MediaWiki independent from a special site (.org, .de, .fr, .it etc) and
upload it to projects.archlinux.org.

>
> I think a LOT of css (and even some semantic markup) can be removed from
> the official Arch sites, but I just came on board and until we have a
> clear vision as to what we're going to accomplish, I don't want waste
> what precious the other web devs have.
>
> Kudos for doing such a good job on the DE site!

thanks :-)

--
archlinux.de

reimplementation of the new design (Pierre Schmitz)
 

On Jan 17, 2008 2:14 PM, Pierre Schmitz <pierre@archlinux.de> wrote:
> OK, perhaps we could coordinate this a bit. If wanted I could try to make
> MediaWiki independent from a special site (.org, .de, .fr, .it etc) and
> upload it to projects.archlinux.org.

I was figuring we could throw all our templates up there somewhere.
MediaWiki, punbb, flyspray. I'm sure someone would find this useful