Local View Design Rules Author: Alia This document is a brain dump of some the neccessary rules for the E-culture local view. It's my personal list to fix all that is wrong of the local view. Feel free to ask me: why this or that. That would help me think about the right ground rules for design decisions rather then merely on personal preference. --- What can not be controlled in the E-culture presentation: Image size and color. Number of Images. Text amount. Background Images varies in shapes and color. Thus background color should be neutral: white. Text 1. Text size should be between 10-14 resizeable for people to adjust themselves. Why this size? It is the size where most people can read comfortably. 2. Text color should be contrast with the white background color. Why Grey? Grey is a good color because it blends well with almost any surrounding color. 3. Title text should draw a lot of attention compared to the normal text. Make text at least 1.5 times the normal text. Can it be bigger? yes, but it will sacrifice aesthetics and it will take more space then neccessary. 1.5 is a good size. 4. In the navigation: add links to all the elements should be on top, thus all elements can be reached by the user. 5. main (nucleus) text should occupy 60% of page width 6. secondary (satellite) text should be as hyperlink only. Because of two things: it is secondary (read not so important) information, and it takes valuable space. Image 1. Always desplay image label if available. 2. Always check how many images which needs to be presented for every node. Depending on how many images to present, do one of the following strategies: 3. If it is only one main (nucleus) image then set it to medium size. occupy about 40% of the page width. (This magic number is an approximate of the golden measurement -- see Design Guidline book) 4. If there are many nucleus image to present one node do either: a. present them in a column, medium size, equal height, one after another. b. present one main one, medium size, and the rest as a row of tumbnail view below it 5. If there are many satellite images to present one node then: a. take the first elements (max 5). and display them as a row of thumnail view. Why 5? no particular reason. 4 is too little and 6 is too much. There is also an aesthetics rule that a row of odd items are more pleasing then a row of even elements. Lynda's comment: How about layout and alignment rules, such as: Title goes above the rest; top of image aligned with top of text (or not, depending on the style - have two different layout "styles"?); scaling for images? Have them all same size? height? width ? aspect ratio? Temporal rules would be nice too - later... -------- Title Actually title does not have to go above the rest. Title is only first here because it is first on the rdf template. I would say that for - general case: the can be anywhere in the page. - for web page: title has to be on top of the webpage. For subtitles: it can be anywhere near the paragraph, althought the common practice is on the top. Alignment issues - General rule: choose one type of alignment and stick to it throughout the presentation. - This leaves with four types of alignment: ragged right, ragged left, justified or centered. - There should be a default setup. (this also holds for every presentation property) Images - There is three image size: normal size, thumbnail size, medium size. - Images should always be in their aspect ratio. - Resize are measured from their max heights and max width: -- Medium size: max height 300 px, max width: 300 px -- Thumbnail size: maz height 120 px, max width 120 px note: this value comes from nowhere. just my preference. Temporal rules: no use case right now. probably in the future. Spatial rules: There is two level of importance: a nucleus and a satellite. - Nucleus images: present them in medium size, if there are many of them, see present them in a column or present only one and the rest as thumbnails. - Satellite images: present them in thumbnails, if it is an example then present only maximum 5 items. - Nucleus text: present them in normal size text. (known problem: what do you do if the text is so long, and there are other things on the bottom of the page: current solution: always have a navigation on the top or left page) - Satelite text: present them as a link only. Note: there is such thing as a thumbnail view of a text. Need to think more on how this would fit.