Today was the MediaWiki.ui hack day, and we briefly discussed the Vector typography refresh that's in BetaFeatures right now.
Several people expressed frustration with the choice to make the sidebar and personal toolbar links smaller size, as well as the grey text used throughout. Our text size already pretty small, and frankly making links greyed out like that violates basic Web usability.[1]
The sidebar color and sizing is a major change that keeps me from opting in to the beta on desktop, despite the fact that I have personally used and enjoyed a very similar font stack across wikis for months.[2] Editors use these two toolbar areas many many times a day when editing, and we're making their life harder with this change.
Despite the above objections, I agree with the reasoning behind the change, which is to put content first in order of priority. Even if we use the toolbars all the time, content comes first in the encyclopedia. So I'd like to propose an alternative solution to this: bumping up the content text size to 1.1em, and leaving the rest at the smaller .8 em. On Chrome and Firefox, OSX this computes to a page content size of 14px.
I made quick gallery of what this looks like on a stub, the Main Page, Portal:Current events, a long article, and a Talk page. It's at http://imgur.com/a/yXVTo
If you play around with this yourself, be sure to apply the sizing only to mw-content-text only, not the body, or else everything will blow up in size. ;)
1. http://www.nngroup.com/articles/guidelines-for-visualizing-links/ 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Steven_Walling/vector.css
+1 for all of Steven's comments and suggestions.
Also, TMg and I commented on the serious linebreak problem, at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Typography_Update#Bugs_.26_compatibility...
On 13-11-13 08:48 PM, Steven Walling wrote:
Today was the MediaWiki.ui hack day, and we briefly discussed the Vector typography refresh that's in BetaFeatures right now.
Several people expressed frustration with the choice to make the sidebar and personal toolbar links smaller size, as well as the grey text used throughout. Our text size already pretty small, and frankly making links greyed out like that violates basic Web usability.[1]
The sidebar color and sizing is a major change that keeps me from opting in to the beta on desktop, despite the fact that I have personally used and enjoyed a very similar font stack across wikis for months.[2] Editors use these two toolbar areas many many times a day when editing, and we're making their life harder with this change.
Despite the above objections, I agree with the reasoning behind the change, which is to put content first in order of priority. Even if we use the toolbars all the time, content comes first in the encyclopedia. So I'd like to propose an alternative solution to this: bumping up the content text size to 1.1em, and leaving the rest at the smaller .8 em. On Chrome and Firefox, OSX this computes to a page content size of 14px.
I made quick gallery of what this looks like on a stub, the Main Page, Portal:Current events, a long article, and a Talk page. It's at http://imgur.com/a/yXVTo
If you play around with this yourself, be sure to apply the sizing only to mw-content-text only, not the body, or else everything will blow up in size. ;)
- http://www.nngroup.com/articles/guidelines-for-visualizing-links/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Steven_Walling/vector.css
-- Steven Walling, Product Manager https://wikimediafoundation.org/
Design mailing list Design@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design
I'm definitely fond of the idea of amping up the content font size a bit (perhaps even a tiny bit more) to elevate its importance, and being more conservative about color changes, especially given that our palette is not very consistent yet.
Erik
We should most definitely NOT be *reducing* the sidebar/personal toolbar font size. They are already small; that would be a terrible idea.
I am absolutely for *increasing* the font size inside of div#content. Let’s increase there, and leave the other alone.
On Nov 13, 2013, at 8:48 PM, Steven Walling swalling@wikimedia.org wrote:
Several people expressed frustration with the choice to make the sidebar and personal toolbar links smaller size, as well as the grey text used throughout. Our text size already pretty small, and frankly making links greyed out like that violates basic Web usability.[1]
--- Brandon Harris, Senior Designer, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
Please make sure this discussion gets captured on https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Typography_Update - I'd hate for there to be multiple places of discussion for this feature. This was the point of putting it into beta first :)
On Wed, Nov 13, 2013 at 10:47 PM, Brandon Harris bharris@wikimedia.org wrote:
We should most definitely NOT be *reducing* the sidebar/personal toolbar font size. They are already small; that would be a terrible idea. I am absolutely for *increasing* the font size inside of div#content. Let’s increase there, and leave the other alone.
On Nov 13, 2013, at 8:48 PM, Steven Walling swalling@wikimedia.org wrote:
Several people expressed frustration with the choice to make the sidebar and personal toolbar links smaller size, as well as the grey text used throughout. Our text size already pretty small, and frankly making links greyed out like that violates basic Web usability.[1]
Brandon Harris, Senior Designer, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
Design mailing list Design@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design
On Thu, Nov 14, 2013 at 1:23 PM, Jon Robson jrobson@wikimedia.org wrote:
Please make sure this discussion gets captured on https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Typography_Update - I'd hate for there to be multiple places of discussion for this feature. This was the point of putting it into beta first :)
Good call Jon. I'll post there with a reference to the list and this thread.
I'm also fine with making the body text bigger and not altering the size of the sidebar text, however i do feel pretty strongly that we make the sidebar link text no longer blue. The point of this is that we are able to iterate quickly.
however, part of me would like to see users respond to it prior to us making changes. otherwise we won't get feedback on the current state (even if we already feel like there are issues with the current state)
Jared
*Jared Zimmerman * \ Director of User Experience \ Wikimedia Foundation
M : +1 415 609 4043 | : @JaredZimmermanhttps://twitter.com/JaredZimmerman
On Fri, Nov 15, 2013 at 3:00 AM, Steven Walling swalling@wikimedia.orgwrote:
On Thu, Nov 14, 2013 at 1:23 PM, Jon Robson jrobson@wikimedia.org wrote:
Please make sure this discussion gets captured on https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Typography_Update - I'd hate for there to be multiple places of discussion for this feature. This was the point of putting it into beta first :)
Good call Jon. I'll post there with a reference to the list and this thread.
-- Steven Walling, Product Manager https://wikimediafoundation.org/
Design mailing list Design@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design