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

Thu Nov 3 21:47:54 UTC 2016

On Thu, Nov 03, 2016 at 03:25:55PM +0000, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
>On Thu, Nov 03, 2016 at 03:56:00PM +0100, Martin Kletzander wrote:
>> 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.
>
>Yeah, I'm not really looking for HTML/CSS review - content typos,
>layout problems, etc are more useful feedback.
>
>> > 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.
>
>Ok, so when talking about the "logo" I consider that to be just
>the bare "tin" with no words. That basic logo form is then used
>to the form the basis of various graphics. The front page banner
>image is the logo combined with the text.  The libvirtLogo.png
>that you mention is an alternative formatting. Both are right,
>they are just tailored for different usage scenarios, depending
>on whether the usage prefers a wide format image, or a square
>format image. The front page and top nav bar both call for the
>banner style logo graphic, but we can still have square format
>logos elsewhere if needed.
>
>I included the SVG as the final patch, so that it is easy for
>us to create different graphics from the same base logo.
>
>The bluriness is caused by inkscape anti-aliasing the font when
>exporting the SVG to PNG. I'll see if I can find any inkscape
>options to reduce this anti-aliasing, or perhaps try a different
>tool for the PNG export.
>

Interesting, I'll have a look at that.

>> > 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).
>
>Do you have Hi-DPI screen ?
>

No, only 1080p on 22" or 24", it might very likely just be my shitty
eyes, though ;)

>Yes, the black text in intro is the same font size as the green
>text in the others.
>
>I'm using the OverpassLight font for the non-heading text.
>
>If you want to see what it looks like with regualar Overpass
>font see here:
>
>  https://berrange.fedorapeople.org/libvirt-new-website-heavy/
>
>I had a slight preference towards OverpassLight, but perhaps
>the regular Overpass looks better on a wider range of screens,
>particularly Hi-DPI screens perhaps.
>

This looks sooo nice, I'd ACK this version.  Even without the other nits
taken care of =)  But let's let others chime in as well.

>I'm pretty ambivalent on this.
>
>> > 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]
>
>Yes, I did not try to exhaustively update all the pages. I'm only
>touching the front page, downloads and a couple of other pages.
>
>There's certainly scope for doing more cleanup across other existing
>pages to follow suit. This series is already rather large though,
>so I prefer to leave that to follow later.
>

Sure, I didn't mean to imply it needs to be all done at one point.
Maybe I can take some time and look at it (after all things I said the
same thing about).
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