New website layout

General Discussion
1

We have just moved to a new website layout. This is the first iteration of the process of renewing panda3d.org. There’s still some work to be done.

Please use this thread for feedback, in particular we are interested in bugs that you may encounter in your particular browser or platform.

2

Are you from Carnegie Mellon?
Actually a better website layout is what Panda3d really needed. I like it. Did you repace the old Panda3d logo from the installer with the new one from the site?

3

No, I’m just a contributor. Glad you like it!

Not yet, but rdb will do that at some point.

4

I like the new layout. I’m not sure I’m sold on the color scheme though.

5

first of all: congratulations and big thanks :slight_smile:
a great new-year present to the community.

i love the new icons, the new structure and especially the download section looks great now. i could go on with that forth and forth but that doesn’t help you make it better, i guess. so here my suggestions for changes:

  • green on green (see header of this forum) gives not enough contrast. also on white the green tone as currently used for links is a bit blurry, i think
  • the main menu should be right-aligned or put on an own bar to leave the logo its space (see unfpa.org/styleguide/compone … espace.htm)
  • the copyright line would look better if vertically aligned at the bottom also on not so filled pages (see gallery).
  • now that we have a nice structure for all the sub-pages, how about some drop-down menus? here are some nice CSS examples: brunildo.org/test/
  • the intro text on the main page should be in a container (block element) and its headline is a bit misleading IMHO.
  • any chance to get the logo without the 3d glasses or in another fashion? just an idea, but how about tinting the eyes green and red?

have a nice day

6

Last time we had drop-down menus on the website, everyone hated it.

7

I like the new look. Don’t see anything wrong with it.
Happy new year everyone.

8

One of the things in my TODO is checking all visual elements in other monitors apart from mine to see if they are readable enough, so don’t worry I’ll probably adjust that at some point.

Main reason it’s left-aligned is to fit the ETC logo. Also, style guides are written for particular purposes and don’t normally tell the whole story. Spaces around logos produce a mental association to luxury (check the design of perfume boxes for example, all that margin around the brands) and solemnity such as in respectable institutions (for the same reason than the former, we associate free space with wealth). I don’t think any of those concerns apply here, our design is pretty casual, so the rules on margin are different.

That would be better yes, but it’s like that for html coding reasons, that would involve making it floating, so it could end up overflowing other elements. Since we have a lot of third party applications integrated in this website I prefer to keep the floating stuff to a minimum.

Agree, submenu is on the works. There are some things on progress as I said, but as we adapted the content to the new layout the website was getting more and more mutilated when viewed under the old layout, so we decided to move on for now. I plan to make a dynamic sub-menu that doesn’t overlap with other elements so that the usability concerns that rdb is bothered about don’t apply.

We are not caring much about the frontpage because there’s a new one in the works for the 1.7.0 release, so disregard that for now.

Ain’t no changing the logo now, much has been talked about it internally and it was hard to reach a consensus. I will provide an alternative clean version of the vector art without the glasses when I have time, so that it can be reused for logos of sub-projects, etc.

And happy new year!

9

This looks great!

10

I like it but, in my opinion, the FamFam icon set doesn’t look so good with this graphics…Why don’t you try to replace it with Oxigen, for example?

11

You are right, there are probably better icon sets. But famfamfam is the only set I know that is optimized for 16x16 which is the only acceptable size for some small elements. Thanks for the idea though, I’ll take a look at that one and other themes at kde-look, I’m not entirely enthusiastic about famfamfam.

12

I like it! Great job! My only personal issue so far is that there is almost too much contrast with the white background. It is almost too much contrast with the black text, if that makes sense.

13

few ideas visualized:
all unified blue tones with a separated navigation
same with a rounded and softer navi bar
it’s just overpainted, but you get the idea

14

you should probably stop reading newspapers :smiling_imp: SCNR
i think black on white is actually the best color-scheme for long reading.

15

there’s a bug with the thumbnails gallery on the right side when you view diffs/changes of some pages: screenshot

also on manual pages where we use the hack to hide the thumbnails, the green navigation bar should be extended.
example: panda3d.org/manual/index.php/L … _Variables

16

I said it was a personal issue :stuck_out_tongue:

17

Great job! The colors and layout are fine in my opinion. My only problem is with the Panda logo. It looks like the panda is looking downward, with the glasses pointing upward. I can’t tell where his actual eyes are.

My personal favorite is the cute panda from the new P3D system. Any way we could incorporate that into the website? If you want, I can put a mock-up together in GIMP to see how it would look.

We should also update the favicon.

18

a great way to start the new year indeed!
now the website looks literally up-to-date
I have just a personal taste objection about the panda logo that looks a little weird to me: either you choose to put the 3d eyeglasses totally on or get rid of it - halfway like that looks a bit laughable.

19

Another personal issue: links underlined look quite “old-fashion” and ugly. Usually, in my stylesheets, I put them underlined only during the hover state since the different color is enough, in my opinion, to identifiy them. This makes the visual layout more clear.

20

It’s good. Just the green colour used for links could be darker (or blue). It lack contrast on the bright background (tiring for the eyes).