sleeker Fix banner?

William One Sac and others,

Hi, I was trying out doing something with the Fix banner which I have thought about a little while, and finally managed to find out how it is done. What I have thought is that the banner looks a bit "stacked", and that it might look better with the icon placed on each side instead of on top like it is now.

Here is a screenshot of what it looks like which I consider might be a better look for the banner. This is just a thought I have and that I wanted to experiment with to see if I could achieve the organization of the elements there like I wanted.

If you think this might be an improvement I will be happy to update the Fix banner template accordingly. In addition to my thinking the banner elements look somewhat better, or more evenly, distributed in my experimental version, it also looks more consistent with the style of the Stub banner.

Then again, it might be that it wouldn't be a good thing for the Stub banner and Fix banner to look that similar. (?) I think I would probably prefer the less tall banner and a replacement for the icon if that were necessary for the banners to be possible to tell apart in a sufficiently easy way.

Optimist


edit: corrected tense in a sentence...

[edit on 2-9-2007 by Optimist]

Yes, I like your idea regarding the fix banner. As for the problem of the fix banner and the stub banners looking similar, you have given me some thoughts as to how to avoid that, while hopefully improving the look of both templates at the same time. I am going to experiment with bolding the words "fix" and "stub". Perhaps even slightly increasing the font size of those words or perhaps the initial sentences. If that doesn't work we can try changing the background colors of the templates, to distinguish them more.

I played around a bit with the stub template. Let me know how you honestly think it looks. This doesn't have to be the final version, but it should give you an idea of what I am talking about.

William One Sac,

Thank you for supporting this concern. I agree that adjusting these things like font and perhaps background color is an improvement, because then the banners' appearance gives an impression of them having been more thought through. So I definitely think those are great ideas.

The stub banner adjustment looks good, and looking at it inside an actual stub article, it seems it functions perfectly as what it is; it looks like a message meant to be noticed, and the key word "stub" grabs attention just right.

A comment I would give is something it seems to me I have half thought about in the past, which is that the icons to the sides of the text might be good to move somewhat farther away from the text and towards the sides. To just try it out, I added some text in the same style as what I experimented with in the Fix banner, which turned out to achieve what I wanted to try. Here is a screenshot so you can see how it seems to you. (By the way, in the screenhot I have inserted the missing "hash" or number sign in the setting for the font color which you maybe didn't want to actually use.)

Moving the icons out to the sides gives a more "balanced" impression, I feel, but perhaps being farther out would also take away a little of the focus which they bring to the banner text located as they are now.

As for the color, that may be superfluous (as you may have thought since the color wasn't shown) but could be good to have as an option if it should happen to turn out the stub and fix banners need to be even more easy to tell apart than what they will be already with the big font of the key words.

Anyway, the updated stub banner is already great. I personally think such little details like tweaking those banners makes the tinWiki pages a little more pleasant to look at since, like I say, it gives the impression that people are thinking things through who are working on the website that the visitors, and users, are spending time and attention reading at. Something like that is what I think I'm thinking. :-)

Optimist


edit:

P.S. I did notice the bold on the link. It seems very appropriate since that link is big part of the actual point to the whole banner, and, to me, highlighting it with bold formatting looks very right. To make sure I hadn't imagined that the bold was new, I looked at the wiki code and noticed another difference was the bottom margin which was increased. That I hadn't noticed, but it looks good when I consider it. To me, it seems perhaps like the increased bottom margin helps bring attention to the word "stub", since it seems like the space is adjusted to any characters of that word's font that might go down in the "cellar" or basement, as, in my first language, they described that part of letters to me in school when I was little, I mean the lower part of letters like g, y, p, q and so on. (Not sure how it's usually said in English...) lol Anyway, this rather laborious description was about something I just thought to myself right now when I looked at the bottom margin.

[edit on 4-9-2007 by Optimist]

I am happy you are pleased with the changes. I also like your idea of aligning the images a little further to the sides. As I said though, none of this is written in stone, we can play around with different colors and such until we refine it to a way that looks the best.

Optimist: I tried implementing your idea about aligning the images in the stub banner to the left and right. However, I was unsuccesful! I am not quite certain what the problem is, as I tried several times to get the image on the right to align to the right. But for some reason the wiki code kept showing inside of the banner.

William One Sac,

I looked in the history, and it seems the second icon caused problems because it was not a line of its own (but was written in the continuation of the category text), which it seems it needs to be. Like the first icon, which turned out according to the plan.

On a side note, when I tried experimenting with this myself, I realized that align settings have only a small effect, since the width of the new cells where each icon is located is almost just as wide as the icon, so there is only a small space where the aligning can happen. (If you want to get the icons a tiny bit out from the edges of the banners, you can even safely align them towards the center, right aligning the left icon, and left aligning the right icon.)

I hope I was able to explain myself. :-)

Optimist