Welcome to the Wikipedia, Marian! Ed Poor
Marian - yay! I'm in favor of making Wikipedia more attractive (call it "eye candy". Me, I like candy) in order to make it more usable. But then, I have Susan Kare bookmarked. O.K. - I think the UI you have posted is very workable. I agree with Verdana. I'm also fond of Arial. Colors are negotiable - yours I like (I hated what went on with wikipedia with colors last month, though it seems to have settled down). I look forward to your contributions. MichaelTinkler
Marian, I think your UI propsal looks great! I'm all for making Wikipedia easier to use, and I think your design would make the project look much more professional too. --Stephen Gilbert
I must say, I like the look you came up with. Not surprising, since you're a pro at this. I think you may have many who're reluctant to abandon the logo, however... given all the discussion and debate that went into establishing it in the first place. Might there be a way to work it in? Or some smaller "representative" symbol? I could be wrong, of course! -- April
While I agree that Arial is good for Headings and quite possibly for interface elements (eg - log in, most wanted, user list etc...), I think that it is a bad idea to use it for the text of articles (unless it is limited to headings and sub-headings). The reasons for this are that serif fonts are generally considered to be easier to read (this is a well-known result), and also that serif fonts often look more professional. In it not necessary to use a very strong serif font, and indeed may be a bad idea (particularly for small font sizes), but many of the reasons for sans-serif fonts are becoming less relevant with the advent of font antialiasing. --The Ostrich
I can't speak for the font properties, since I'm no pro, but I think it looks spiffy. Professional and streamlined. Koyaanis Qatsi
Magnificent! Cruel, though, to tease us with just a PNG and not the HTML/CSS. :) Personally, I like Verdana as well... but it might be a Very Very Good Idea to make the font specification optional; some people are very picky about their fonts and prefer to set them in the browser. (On the other hand, they're free to tell their browser to override the web page's specification, no?) Other thoughts:
- The two sidebars take up a huge amount of space; articles with large maps, photos, and tables may suffer. Also, will text wrap around them on longer articles, or do we have a fixed column width? The latter is probably more attractive, but always strikes me as inefficient (and annoying when putting two windows side-by-side to compare or copy).
- You're not using tables for those sidebars, right? Tables for layout be the work of the devil.
- Make sure there's a place for the multilanguage links (for an example, see the header areas of European Union or Esperanto). They can be shrunken down to two/three-letter codes if need be, but there must be room for them.
Brion VIBBER 2002/03/23
As the original designer of the current layout (and as a fellow student in Cologne;) I think your UI looks much better than the current one and should definitely become one of the available skins in the user preferences. Then we can see how well it works in every-day-wikying;) and make it the default skin if it performs well.
- I like the Verdana font, as long as it has a fallback option to Arial or Times New Roman (easy enough with CSS). On the "printable version" pages, we should use Times, though, as that is the best font for printing, IMHO.
- As the current layout is based on tables, I don't have a problem if yours uses tables as well, as long as the midle column doesn't have a fixed width of 666 pixel ;)
- The two sidebars do look great, but I agree with Brion that they might wreck the layout of the articles, especially on low-res screens (800x600 or worse). How about having everything in the left sidebar, with the background shade of the right one? The user could switch it all to the right, just like you can switch the current sidebar to the left now.
- I don't have a problem with removing the logo, as long as it is not exchanged for another one. The "logo" on the PNG can be completely made from text.
Really, very nice! --Magnus Manske
Perhaps you could make screenshots of the layout using windows different widths, so we can judge its flexibility better. Matthew Woodcraft
Another vote in favor -- I really would like to see this as one of the skins, perhaps the default skin.
While agree with the Ostrich in theory about readablility and serif fonts, I have to admit I like the overall clean look with the sans serif overall. Ah well . . . ClaudeMuncey
I think this looks great. I would really like it if user's could personalize a few parameters. Someone mentioned fonts. I would like to be able to have this UI in green tones, as MS blue always bothers me and I usually change what I can. Would that be very difficult? On the other hand I wouldn't want to offer a slew of personalizations, just a few. Rose Parks