Micah
Hey all,
Been super-busy so I haven't had a chance to follow up on all the feedback, but I wanted to get out a preview of the campaign landing page.
!https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/145070/portal-campaign.jpg!
h3. Notes on Theming
* There will be an assortment of background images to choose from. We're planning on getting quite a few more than we have now. There will be a few for free campaigns, and many more for Ascendant ones.
* For now, you can't upload your own background, but we hope to get there one day. It can still be done with CSS.
* The color scheme will be (somewhat) configurable. The plan is to allow you to choose a premade color scheme, or define your own with several colors. So, in the example, you could change the yellow to red or blue. Right now, we're imagining 3 or 4 configurable colors. If you've ever played with Twitter's theme controls, you get the idea.
* If the basic theming (background and colors) still isn't enough, you can always write your own CSS.
* So, basically there are 3 levels of theming: select premade background and color scheme, premade background and custom colors, or fully customize everything with CSS. You can also choose the basics and then write a handful of custom CSS rules to override anything you don't like.
Hopefully this strikes a good balance, allowing most people to have something that looks nice with no work, while still allowing power users the ability to customize to their heart's content.
h3. Other Notes
* We're going to reorganize somewhat to better highlight the GM.
* The content area looks small, but we're trying to size it according to best practices for line length and text readability. (read "here":http://www.simonstratford.com/ideal-line-length/ and "here":http://www.simonstratford.com/ideal-line-length/ ) Any thoughts here?
* It will be a fluid/responsive layout that resizes as your viewport does. Translation: It will look good on different sized screens and size down nicely to mobile.
* The top nav bar will be there with links to your other campaigns, account settings, and most importantly: quick search for the campaign.
Comments
I don't really like how this has a completely and utterly different design from the campaign dashboard. I thought part of the idea of the reforging was to give everything a uniform look and feel? The dashboard is nice, simple, looks easy to use, and provides plenty of space. One of the things I really liked about the campaign dashboard was that it actually used the entire screen; this design completely wastes a large amount of screen real estate. This is not only a big drop in utility, but also looks rather ugly. The content area looks *way* too small. It looks significantly smaller than the current content area, which is *already* too small. There's no way to fit any kind of reasonable table on there, making it almost useless for a gaming-focused wiki, as games typically require significant use of tables.
Is there any reason the basic theme of the campaign dashboard can't be ported over to the rest of the site? I'd really like to retain uniformity of style, and the campaign dashboard's basic style has higher utility than this design which in my opinion makes it the better choice.
Also: Did you want the rest of the campaign to be in the style of this campaign landing page, or of the dashboard?
Also2: Why not go Wikipedia's route and have line lengths be dependent upon the screen size? Artificially limiting line length doesn't seem to serve much purpose and it drastically limits utility. The only real reason to do so is to make things simpler to design a site that'll look uniform over multiple monitor setups, but I'm not sure you need to enforce that; we're a wiki site primarily, and Wikipedia has already shown that things can look just fine if they auto-fit to the size of the window.
My two cents, back to work!
Less content area is bad, plain and simple. I disagree that the current is too small, but any smaller is painful, and a little more would be welcomed.
I also agree that Wikipedia's route on having line lengths being dependent on screen size would be a huge improvement.
I disagree that this is ugly- I think that it is a big improvement. I like the notes on theming. Love the incorporation of COTM at the top. I think this will be huge for the majority of games not wanting to dig into the coding- bringing them a better look out of the box is brilliant, and a huge improvement.
Just trying to help out.
EDIT: Also, some of the things that I've tried with Edgerunners are what led me to believe the current content area is a little too small. Specifically, the "Armory":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/edgerunners/wikis/firearms section with all of its weapon tables would really rather have a hundred or so pixels of space more, so longer names and other things can fit in one line. Mind you, this could be fixed just by removing the secondary column and using that for primary content, and the majority of that secondary column really isn't needed on every wiki page anyways.
Just trying to help out.
To your points about the unification of the design, the main idea is that we will have 2 distinct parts of each campaign: the dashboard area and the public facing area. The dashboard will be designed to give you and your players quick access to your campaign from a more task-oriented viewpoint, while the public facing side will be more design oriented. We're trying to straddle a line where we make the site more useful to people who just want it to be a tool, while also catering to those who want a particular style.
You make a good point about being a wiki site, and how it's different than other sites, like a blog. That does call into question the focus on optimal line length. That's more appropriate for something like a blog or a news site, which is where a lot of the web best practices discussion is focused. I'll definitely bring this up with the designer.
I especially agree with the focus being a wiki/web site, and less of a blog!
Just trying to help out.
Note: In general I hate these kinds of configuration settings. It's easy for them to get out of hand and you have 100s of settings that 99% of people never use and the codebase is horribly complicated. So, when someone asks, "Can you make XYZ configurable?" the default answer is, "No" But, I agree that having more space would be nice so I'm willing to bend a little.
I'm not ready to get rid of the nav altogether, or move it to a horizontal layout, because on the left it will actually follow you as you scroll. We are also planning on putting in some helpful links on the left, like "edit this page" or "create a new adv. log post" so those controls are always close at hand. Like the rest of the menu, they will follow as you scroll.
The design will be responsive, meaning as you resize the screen, the content will reflow and resize appropriately. That may make some complicated tabular layouts very difficult.
Keep the ideas coming.
I also quite like the use of transparencies. I do wonder if they would look a little better if they where slightly more 'solid' i.e. increased opacity.
Looking good though.
Cheers
Andy
Just trying to help out.
@MarkGiguere - Assuming you mean the dashboard, that's a good point. You can always get back to the dashboard using the top nav (not shown), but it might be nice to have a link here somewhere.
Just trying to help out.
In my mind, this is the landing page -- summary. You get a synopsis of the current state, the players, recent updates, and then have options to navigate deeper. I think a three-column layout seems fine on this page, and will help encourage people to actually summarize and make a landing page that is worth landing on.
If I want to go read the Adventure Log, then I can click the icon and go to a page that is two-column with more room for actually seeing updates.
I wouldn't suggest collapsing the icons entirely, but I could see them being icons with less text. Instead of "Adventure Log", you could see "Log" or "Diary" or something. That gives back a bit of space without giving up the usability of seeing exactly what it is you're about to click on. (And I wouldn't recommend doing any sort of mouseover thing; those aren't very accessible, particularly to screen reader users.)
What about a Windows-like sliding height/width option (possibly with text-wrapping) to allow for individually customized displays? Just throwing it out there.
Oh, and +1 to Andy about the possibility of opacity adjustment.
~Mae
CotM Selection Committee
As to comments, I'm considering phasing them out altogether. They don't serve much purpose and I think it would be better to provide a way to easily communicate (privately) with the GM. Especially since the forum has come along and replaced any intra-group communication that the comments provide.
We're still playing with a few ideas on how to free up more space in the middle. Shrinking to a single left column of icons is one idea, as is removing the left column altogether, perhaps moving to a top nav.
Finally, as to opacity, it will always be modifiable via custom CSS. That's definitely sticking around.
Torn on the comments- There are over 100 on mine, but could people pm'd or said something in the forum? Definitely. I actually like the idea- that may not go over well with the community....
Love the idea of moving to top nav!
We all cannot wait! Any chance of showing the page with some of your proposed changes?
Just trying to help out.
~Weasel0
A Parade of Black | ShadowRunHack |
Where I play with CSS code