Style: Database/Tabula Rasa

[ninetydegrees]

Edit: these are now live and can be selected from Customize Style. Original layers and pics are no longer available.


Style: Database
Author: ninetydegrees
Image info: background is mine; icons are somerandomdude's (CC Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States)

New version of an earlier draft and, hopefully, the actual submission post. *g* Feedback would be great!

Themes:

Blue / Preview
Gray / Preview
Green / Preview
Purple / Preview
Red / Preview
Teal / Preview

And that's it because I'm too tired to make more themes...

Edit: looks better with Neuropol X Free font, which I may or may not be able to embed.

Comments

[matgb]

Ooh, looks nice to me. Header takes up too much space though, especially on this netbook (1024*600), and post titles are bit small for my tastes, and not sure I like the way it overlaps both the entry box and the main background.

Definitely like the idea of drop shadowing userpics, might have to lift that one.

[ninetydegrees]

I'm glad you think it does.
You can move the navigation list to the sidebar to make the header smaller. Would that work for you?
Titles are bigger now and no longer overlaps the box but also have a little shadow. Better?
I feel it's a cheap but effective trick on a very dark background. :)

[matgb]

Navlist on sidebar would work, yes-I'm not actually thinking of switching themes, mine is still a complete work-in-progress, but there're ideas that work well, and i like the purple colours. I'm actually thinking more of default appearance, I keep meaning to post a bit about how large headers can be offputting and similar-it's a lot more noticeable on a smaller screen like this one.

The shadow on the title looks a bit blurred to me, but it is better and clearer.

Now, what actually needs testing with it? There's no sidebar on the tags page (and that infinite loop bug is still there but that's not a style issue). Really like the calender display, especially on the archive page.

[ninetydegrees]

Yeah I have a larger screen and never resize it so I see things differently. I must say I'm a big fan of big headers and love spacing things out too so...

Hmm. I can make the shadow a bit darker but then it would seem as if there were no shadow at all.

There's no sidebar on the tags page
Really??

It's the first time I've styled a style that extensively, including elements which I don't use such as the nav strip and the contextual hover pop-ups. I've upped the text-size to 1em in the nav strip in particular and, although it looks fine for me, I can't say for sure it works well. As for the rest, well, it's everything I didn't think to test it with and I don't know what that is. You usually only hear about these kinds of issues from people who use the style.

[matgb]

ou usually only hear about these kinds of issues from people who use the style.
And even then they might not notice. We've been live, what, two and a half years now? I build my theme when TR was just Core2Testing.

I realised I'd done nothing whatsoever with the month/year view archive page and it was almost unusable a few months ago.

Problem with big headers is usability, it was drummed into me when I learnt usability alongside basic coding that if users don't see some actual content above the fold, they might just close the tab/window and go away, and I find that's true even for me today, get to a page, it's got a big logo header, a banner ad, some 'top stories' content, the actual headline for the article I'm there for is hidden so far down it's offputting.

But yeah, no sidebar in Firefox or Chrome, but the thought occurs it might not be there as there's been a [1]Error running style: Style code didn't finish running in a timely fashion. Possible causes:
Infinite loop in style or layer

Database busy error on my tags page ever since I imported, I probably ought to chase that up again, it was an early bug but I so rarely use tags page I forget to check the progress.

[ninetydegrees]

Problem with big headers is usability, it was drummed into me when I learnt usability alongside basic coding that if users don't see some actual content above the fold, they might just close the tab/window and go away, and I find that's true even for me today, get to a page, it's got a big logo header, a banner ad, some 'top stories' content, the actual headline for the article I'm there for is hidden so far down it's offputting.

Guess it's all a matter of taste and purpose. A beautiful design like this one often makes me want see more, not move on. A boring design or a cluttered one often will. It depends on what I'm there for. Besides, I don't pretend to make beautiful styles but I do try to make them a little different from what we already have because I don't see the point otherwise. We don't have a nice horizontal style for example. This won't be usable by users with small resolutions but some with bigger ones might like one.

[feathertail]

Are the entry titles supposed to be straddling the border of each entry, or is it just Chromium? >.>

Anyway, I think the rounded backgrounds are the only element that seems unclassy to me ... the rest of it looks really nice, and dramatic. And I'm not sure how else to set entries apart, anyway.

[ninetydegrees]

They were. Changed things a bit.
Rounded is this style's theme so I'm not sure changing would work. I've made a little less rounded, though.
Thanks for the feedback.

[feathertail]

Okies ... sorry to criticize. I really do like it.

[ninetydegrees]

No apologies needed. I do appreciate the concrit. And sorry about having words missing from my previous comment. It's clearly too early for my poor brain. *g*

[baggyeyes]

I'll install it and see how it goes. I like the changes you've made.

[ninetydegrees]

Wonderful! I was hoping you would. Thank you. (I think the version you have now is the one I originally posted and not the most recent one.)

I'm glad you like them. I wanted the style to look neater and more balanced.

[baggyeyes]

Since mine is not the most active of journals, I populated a dummy post with fake comments; 27 comments to be exact. On my small monitor, the comment thread became skinnier and skinnier until there was little actual room for the text of the comment. I posted one long comment at the end.

Firefox ver. 6, Mac OS X, 10.6.8,
Viewport width: 1108px
Viewport height: 528px

Screen resolution 1280 x 800.

[ninetydegrees]

Thanks for testing this!

*cringes* This is why I hate custom comment pages. With the amount of spacing/padding I like to have, this always happen. I don't know what I can do, really.

[baggyeyes]

Is there a way to have the direction of the thread flip, as it reaches a certain point? I mean, so that it goes in the other direction, rather than right, while maintaining the link between comments.

Do I make sense?

[ninetydegrees]

You do but I'm reluctant to change existing behavior as I think there's a risk it'll only add more confusion.