[Kss-devel] New design mockup

[Balazs Ree]

Ok, here is my review:

In overall, it looks good and it is definitely going to somewhere. Nice 
work.

Now I would like to visit the elements one by one.


1. I like the paletta. The greys with the "kss orange" makes it really 
elegant.

2. The logo: looks good in placement and proportion. It is also good that 
the text is next to it. The line "KSS, doing AJAX with style" is 
something I also like a lot. Maybe we want AJAX with all capitals.

However for some reason I don't like the way the text is rendered, I 
think we should try changing something with it, either make it bigger, or 
choose a diffent font, change alignment... I am not sure.

I also would consider not closing the portlet on the top with a line, ie, 
the white region under the logo could extend until the top of the page.

3. The icons are also good. We should first, decide, what icons we need 
actually in addition to Download and Documentation. (Bugs? Community? 
Blog?) Maybe we need 4 of them instead of 3, that would make them smaller 
which may also even look better. Finally, once we decided what iconss we 
want, they also should be designed so we can see them.

4. I like the way the portlet is designed. Just one remark. The 
"submenus" is in fact substitutes the navtree menu, ie, how will the 
"submenus" look like if we have more levels expanded? We may want to 
decide that we do not allow to show the part of the navtree that goes 
down till the currently watched item, but we need at least a sublevel. 
I'd like to see how it would look like with a realistic case and first of 
all we need to decide how we want its implementation. (This is first 
possibility, see next point of why maybe we don't need more sublevels 
after all.)

5. The top menu looks good. Just occurs to me, maybe the "submenus" is 
supposed to just be the 2nd level of the navigation tree, as next level 
to the the top menus that are the first level? Then we could actually 
switch the submenus with kss, when the main menu is hovered. In this case 
we can drop the concept of the traditional navtree completely. (It is 
just then they are a bit far away so from navigating first I need to 
click on the top then on the left, may be a bit inconvenient.)

In any way I'd like to get a bit of clarification about the concept of 
the menus and navigation.

Finally some word about missing elements from the mockup. This is more 
about to initiate a discussion.

6. We need a global site actions and searchbox. Global site actions could 
be shown for logged in users only or left completely away, but we 
definitely need the search box and that should be in the mockup.

7. What about the user actions. They can also be shown only for logged in 
users, well, at least we have to show somewhere who is logged in, and 
this is not clear where it is intended to be. We can in fact make that 
into a portlet and have it appear under the news, only for logged in 
users. WE can also put important things from the site actions, so we have 
this one "action" portlet.

8. Do we need breadcrumbs? I am personally not a big fan of them, but 
especially if we have no full navtree, only a menu system with a level 
and sublevel, I am in doubt if we'd need breadcrumbs.


So this is all what I can think of at the moment, but altogether I am 
pretty enthusiastic. I would like to hear other comments and a discussion 
about the above mentioned points, especially about the subjects of icons, 
menus and navigation. Thanks for all the work so far!

-- 
Balazs Ree