[libvirt] [PATCH 00/17] Redo website layout and branding

Thu Nov 3 14:56:00 UTC 2016

On Mon, Oct 31, 2016 at 12:41:41PM +0000, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
>The current libvirt website design dates from 2008 and
>has not changed significantly since. Compared to
>contemporary open source project websites it looks
>pretty dated and cluttered.
>

I like the idea of updating the page.  However I'm out of
HTML/CSS/etc. stuff for a while, so I don't feel like doing technical
review of the series.  On the other hand it doesn't have to be perfect
from the technical POV, so I think that unless there is something
someone disagrees with, it's just about the design.

>This series incrementally changes the website to have
>a completely new layout and branding.
>
>Since the original adobe illustrator files are long
>since lost, this series introduces a newly created
>variant of the libvirt logo with Inkscape as an SVG
>file.
>

This is a pity.  But well, we can update the logo as well, why not.
[warning: subjective opinions follow, don't take them personally]

I don't like the new logo.  Just a few things would make me feel better
about it.  a) if the "virtualization api" didn't make it ten times wider
because it's not a logo anymore, it's more like a banner now.  b) was
that logo made small and then increased in size?  The dark tone of "lib"
together with the blurriness of it makes my eyes hurt.  It's nice that
it is in SVG, but I believe making it closer to the libvirtLogo.png [1]
(even when keeping it crooked/tilted) would be way nicer to look at.

>The libvirt logo used a specific font with angled tops
>to letters like "l", "b" and "t" - this is the "Overpass"
>font, made available by Red Hat under an open source
>font license. The re-branding makes use of webfont
>support so that we can use this font across the entire
>libvirt website for a consistent look.
>

This is good.  I didn't like the font and particularly the inconsistency
in font types in the old website.  But looking at the front page, the
font sizes for the three content boxes are different and I feel like
that's way bigger inconsistency.  The black text in "Introduction" is
probably the same size as the green-ish link text in the other two, but
the lines are so thin that even hinting and auto-aliasing doesn't help
smoothing it out (on my display, maybe it's better on different ones).

>The colors of the website CSS now exactly match the
>colors used in the logo in most places.
>

Yes!!!

>The bigger change is in the layout, with the huge
>left hand sitemap nav bar being removed to give more
>space to the main content. The front page now directly
>links to the key pages that were shown to be highly
>visited in the apache web logs. Most of the rest of
>the links are now available from the "docs.html" page
>linked from "Learn" in the top nav bar.
>

More space for the main content is nice, but using the whole width is
not something you can see very often.  I believe it's because it's way
nicer to looking at, especially when you have short paragraphs that
would otherwise span the whole width of the page just to be two lines
long.  That's the case after this series.

Also the table on downloads page is nice, but other tables don't follow
the same pattern.  Plus they are on the side as well, e.g. acl.html [2]

>Another key change is that the download page now
>covers all language bindings, test suites, docs
>released by the project, not merely the core C
>library.
>
>Finally a new page "contribute.html" is added as the
>source of information useful to people wishing to get
>involved in the libvirt project.
>
>View the new site here
>
>https://berrange.fedorapeople.org/libvirt-new-website/
>

s/betworks/networks/ in docs/index.html.in and docs/docs.html.in.  That
copy-paste made me thinking whether we can re-use some of the content,
but there's probably not much, you would've noticed that.

Final thoughts: the things I mentioned above don't mean that I don't
like it.  I do, it's just that if we're trying to make it better, I feel
like we can do it even better than that.  For making lots of the content
look better space- and consistency-wise, we could maybe use some
patternfly/bootstrap even when it will be just for (mostly) static
site.  At least it looks like the cool kids do that nowadays ;)  Anyway,
that's the whole brain dump I had regarding this.  Hopefully others will
also push/pull some ideas around so we have a forward-moving discussion.

Thanks,
Martin

[1] http://libvirt.org/libvirtLogo.png
[2] https://berrange.fedorapeople.org/libvirt-new-website/acl.html
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