[wp-design] Re: Shuttle Wave 1

[Michael Heilemann]

Alright, so I've looked over Khaled's wave o' stuff from this morning,
and I really like what I see. I of course have a bunch of stuff I'd
like to see happen, but by and large I like where it's heading.

But in thinking about how we get going from here, I came to the
conclusion that we'd all be much better off if we could get the coders
to take what we've got here and put it into PHP/XHTML/CSS.

That way we could start hammering out the final form while figuring
out the details.

Whatta ya say?

- Mike

On 3/1/06, khaled Abou Alfa <brokenkode at gmail.com> wrote:
> Evening/Afternoon/Morning everyone,
>
> Hope you're all well and good. I know I said I do EVERYTHING before I send
> it all through, but to be honest I've done enough here that I've set the
> RULES of the redesign. Stuff that effectively will get copied in various
> ways. Sure I'm going to visit all the remaining pages for completion
> purposes however I felt that I've reached a specific point which get my
> thoughts across.
>
> I actually remembered why I wanted to do this in the first place. For a
> while there the redesign was getting a bit of a chore for me, and that's not
> the way it's supposed to be. I should have been enjoying it, which for some
> reason I wasn't. I realised that the reason was that I was second guessing
> everything I did. Every pixel. I'd send through for comment or see if anyone
> would take it and run with it, however it didn't really work like that,
> except in the very beginning. The good thing is that we kept talking and a
> lot of thoughts and ideas filtered through to me LOUD and clear.
>
> I've tried hard to implement as much stuff we talked about as possible while
> at the same time giving them a polished look that I think we got together to
> do in the first place. Some elements you might not agree with and I'll try
> and explain my thought process (I'm getting better at this, whereas a year
> and a half I was pretty rubbish at it).
>
> Where the hell are the tabs you monkey?
> I'm sorry but I never liked them. They grew on me, but not completely. What
> I've done here is take a step back and see what we currently have in the wp
> admin. I've used our convention of highlighting the current view in a tab,
> and the colour coordination right now makes it very easy to distinguish
> where we actually are in the page. I've shown Matt one page and he
> mentioned/thought that the menu was too close together. I disagree, but
> that's a personal preference. I'm not going to argue for a few pixels to be
> honest with you, but what I don't want is something like we currently have.
> It's far too large. No point whatsoever.
>
> Where the hell is the name of the blog?
> Why do you need it? Do you need your admin panel to remind you what you've
> called your blog? Now the only reason I can think of is if you've got
> multiple blogs and you;ve got several of them open. If this is a serious
> problem then I guess we can find a place where the name can be incorporated
> (maybe afterr Your WordPress for Broken Kode, or whatever). Keep the top
> uncluttered and simple.
>
> Getting out of the admin panel.
> This is either going to the site, or logging off. So they are next to each
> other. Very simple very easy. Yes I'm using the silk icons. I like them,
> They're nice and while you might say they're overused, until we get someone
> to do proper icons then we might as well use a good looking set like this.
> It's not like it's going to be worse than not having them.
>
> How many colours?
> I've effectively used the following colours in the entire admin panel:
> 3 shades of blue. These colours are used for links and for text throughout
> the admin panel as well. Brings a complete unity to the whole thing.
> 3 shades of grey. The background of the admin panel itself. and then the two
> different shades of highlights used for distinguishing elements in a list
> (like in the links or whatever).
> White. Used exclusively in the text boxes for obvious reasons.
> Yellow text has also been used for the WARNING messages (but more on those
> just below).
>
> System messages.
> See while I really like the colours as visual indicators, it was something
> that I didn't get rid of easily. I did fight this a bit but I honestly was
> trying to make it seem more cohesive. The thing is  I honestly loved what
> Mike had done for the login box message so I utilised that throughout. The
> system messages all come in the dark blue rounded rectangles and the colour
> of text and icon indicate (along with the text itself) whether it's a bad
> thing or a good thing. The good messages are all in blue (so the success and
> the update available). Bad stuff in yellow.
>
> Buttons
> As Joen has rightly said on numerous occasions all real buttons should be
> left to the OS to sort out. However there are a couple of instances where we
> need link buttons and I've made these stand out more by giving them a
> rounded grey or dark blue background depending on what it actually does.This
> can be seen in the plugins, in the themes page etc.
>
> Ajax
> One thing you'll have noticed that we've not really talked about is all this
> ajaxy loading business. This is an idea I've nicked from Michael again.
> Specifically from his archives menu which is very cool indeed. The idea to
> just use that in the entire admin panel came after I was looking for a
> solution to the whole theme preview and what would actually look decent. Now
> I don't know how realistic I'm being with all of this. I don't know which
> browsers will die, but I'm willing to bet that if opodo.co.uk or
> expedia.co.uk can sort it out to work in IE and FF then we shouldn't have
> any problem getting this to work in the admin panel. This is a great visual
> indicator because many times WP does take it's merry time to deal with
> things, which would be fine if we were notified about it. When we met up in
> November Matt you were fishing for additional features. At the time I didn't
> actually have a proper idea for you, this however to me is one of those,
> ideas that will be GOLDEN and ELEVATE wp completely and utterly above the
> rest. In MANY MANY ways. To me it's a usability issue.
>
> Sidebar messages
> This is for the new user. This is for the person that doesn't use WP all
> that often and when they do they get confused. This is for the little man
> that gets scared and runs away. This is definitely a usability issue. For
> the hardened user it's not all that important that this text is there. It's
> not completely obtrusive, just sits there. This does eat into the overall
> real estate however in many ways this is available to be exploited. Not
> always but oftentimes.
>
> MAX Width
> Which brings me to something that I really wish could be put in here, even
> though I know you'll ignore me here, but I really wish we have a max width.
> I know it's not compatible with IE, but who cares. It just means that those
> users who choose not to use a standard compliant browser will have it
> stretch to the end, while those that use ff get to see a tight looking admin
> panel. It's just a thought (one that I will probably be modding my admin css
> for anyway but I thought I'd mention it here because I really think it's not
> something that is difficult to have...or am I wrong?
>
> Uploading images
> Erm yeah, dunno what you guys were thinking with this one. It's nice but not
> very practical to use, not accessible and not very clear. I've used the same
> options but made it a tab bit better. I'm sure Mike Little will appreciate
> the changes here.
>
> WordPress logo
> Ignore the blue ones. That was the original idea, but then I was going for
> consistency which is why it's white in accordance with the log in page.
>
> Login Page
> I know it's like beating a dead horse. I just want to say that I've changed
> nothing, except the fact that it's not a sticker/tab/ipod thing and that
> there is no gradient. The only reason I did this is because of consistency.
> I wanted the login page to feel as though it belongs to the rest of the
> admin panel,which a floating thing really didn't. No drop shadows anywhere
> so it just seemed out of place.
>
>
> Final thoughts
> The idea now is for you guys to look at the stuff and jot down your likes
> and dislikes. I'm in the process of cleaning up the actual files so that
> everyone can edit them at will. Mull them over. I'm not saying they're
> perfect, not by any stretch of the imagination but I definitely believe
> they're a step in the right direction. Hopefully between us we'll be able to
> massage it all into the final form that we want it to exist in.The coders
> have got a decent amount of work ahead of them I'm sure but hey that's got
> to be fun right?
>
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--
Aloha,
Michael Heilemann
http://binarybonsai.com