On Jan 17, 2008 9:00 AM PST, Pierre Schmitz <pierre@archlinux.de> wrote:
Hi all,
the last few days I have been working on implementation of the new design for archlinux.de. This might be interesting for some of you; especially for those who maintain other arch sites.
I have simplified the css and html code. There were some strange and useless parts (like the background image to draw those two bars at the top)
Good job, I know it needs it. I am not going to worry about this for now, because there are "changes in the works" that may make this irrelevant.
I have modified the logo: I removed the hard to read TM (isn't this useless anyway) and change the font from liberation to dejavu because of hinting errors. Furthermore I used Gimp instead of Inkscape to create the png which results in a much sharper output. Finally I used optipng to make all pngs smaller. :-)
I will stay clear of the trademark debate, but with respect to the sub-text under the logo, this is simply a matter of preference. The old logo did not use antialiasing, while the new one does. Some may argue that means the new logo is broken--I disagree. Most professional logos use antialiased fonts for text. I agree that Inkscape's font rendering isn't the best, but personally I don't care for the ultra-crisp version at the DE site either, but to each their own.
I created the MediaWiki theme from scratch. Its based on the monobook theme but I left the original css files untouched. Instead I wrote a new archlinux.css which just overrides some box positions and colours to our needs. This should make upstream updates much easier. In the past some updates were a lot of work because of many changes to the css code. And of course: Its much easier to maintain only the changes in a separate file.
The work you did on the wiki looks great...if I could offer one suggestion it would be to make sure the links are not the same colour as the headings.
I have changed some colours compared to the theme from archlinux.org (grey boxes on the start page and using grey and blue for the wiki)
Overall, I think you have some great ideas about separating the styles from the upstream content/themes--we plan to do the same for the official site. The current state of the official site is definitely in transition--we mainly want to get the new logo into circulation at this point. The 'refinement' is coming... I think a LOT of css (and even some semantic markup) can be removed from the official Arch sites, but I just came on board and until we have a clear vision as to what we're going to accomplish, I don't want waste what precious the other web devs have. Kudos for doing such a good job on the DE site!