[arch-dev-public] reimplementation of the new design (Pierre Schmitz)

[thayer]

On Jan 17, 2008  9:00 AM PST, Pierre Schmitz <pierre at 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!