Hey James,
On 01/14/2013 09:27 PM, James Alexander wrote:
I generally agree that banners have been overused,
they have a big effect
but a big presence and we don't want to abuse that. I'm really happy to see
things like Echo being worked on in Engineering which will add a much
better 'intermediate' choice for messaging which we currently really don't
have.
I wasn't aware of "Echo" (seems to be a fairly new project). Actually I
proposed a similar project during the lightning talks 2011 in Haifa.
Glad to see that WMF finally tackles this issue :)
The size of the banner was a conscious choice but one
I thought about for a
fair bit. It's what I would generally consider a 'medium' banner but has
clearly migrated itself to being one of the larger types that we use,
compared to the past couple years where they tended to be significantly
bigger (generally mirroring the size of the fundraising banners at the time
which were significantly larger then this). These ones are around 100px
which is the size or smaller (depending on the banner) then the fundraising
banners this year (before they expanded).
For those interested the general idea I was trying to do was to pick a size
that was the smallest it could be while still getting the information
across that I thought was important. In general that meant I wanted:
- Everyone to know that it was a shop banner, I didn't want anyone
clicking on it without knowing that's what it was ( or at least as few
people as we can).
- To know that it was targeted at Editors/Volunteers and that some of
the merch was specifically targeted at that.
- To know that it was run by the foundation so that people, hopefully,
don't think that we've been hacked or that some random shop was doing this.
- Be generally readable without effort
I wanted to more specifically call out on the banner that the profits went
to the Merchandise Giveaway Program that has been a runaway success but, to
be honest, I both ran out of space and it's more of a reality for the
public push because we've cut out almost all of the margin for the logged
in sale.
I try to support a bunch of different window sizes and resolutions and in
the end it just didn't seem to work well any smaller then this (but didn't
have to be any bigger). We still have some issues with the smaller side of
windows/resolutions and am still looking at good ways to adapt for that but
are getting there.
Alright, I'm glad you put much thought into this. Hopefully in the
future we'll have a better tool with Echo that permits less obtrusive
ways of informing our readers.
Best regards,
Tobias