21–30 of 305 posts
The front page of Wikipedia works remarkably well for discovery - go to en.wikipedia.org on any given day, and you are guaranteed to learn something new. Deciding that users want to see your overbearing minimalism and your 'sound-great-in-concept-meetings-but-shit-on-paper' designs instead of you know, actual information on the front page of an encyclopaedia strikes me as an astonishing act of hubris. The one piece o…
This is awesome. I'm not on board with everything (as someone else pointed out, the navigation is huge and overshadows the content), but it does a good job of rethinking how users interact with Wikipedia by making it easier to use for research. Unfortunately, I can't see anything like this ever happening due to inertia and the direct democracy system that Wikipedia generally employs when making changes.
If they made a mediawiki theme that could easily be applied or made an option, they might actually have a chance. << I don't think they did that though.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Gee_totes/modern.css
(it's not very custom, more of a PoC)
Too much space is taken up by navigation in this scheme. There's a reason Wikipedia's design is dominated by text.
As another response notes, G+ is absolutely horrible at its content-to-navigation space allocation. The more so as most of the navigation elements are styled as "fixed", and won't move.
I pretty much always view the site with an editor open to pick off the most annoying of these features. I'm working on a Stylish script.
I also think that they add too much focus on the site wide navigation stuff at the top, which takes away the focus on the data.
The front page of Wikipedia works remarkably well for discovery - go to en.wikipedia.org on any given day, and you are guaranteed to learn something new. Deciding that users want to see your overbearing minimalism and your 'sound-great-in-concept-meetings-but-shit-on-paper' designs instead of you know, actual information on the front page of an encyclopaedia strikes me as an astonishing act of hubris. The one piece o…
Google indexes wikipedia so I haven't seen the front page in years.
Draw the pretty colored lines after you grok the concept.
It goes downhill for me as they try to get more technical, redefining the way the encyclopedia is edited and organized. Drag and drop reformatting of article layouts? Really? Don't the best Wikipedia articles tend to be conformant to template layouts?
Wikipedia is not Digg. It does not have, as its primary goal, the delight of random web users. They are doing something bigger than that.
I'm also not a fan of the branding idea. First, they've confused Wikipedia with The Wikimedia Foundation. The two aren't the same thing. The branding they propose makes sense only for the latter. Second, they're trying to do that organic living logo thing that has become ultra-trendy lately (just read Brand New Blog to see it done well); "as Wikimedia evolves, the little lines in the logo will change". Well, maybe, but the relationship between Wikimedia top-level properties doesn't change all that regularly, nor does it meaningfully change depending on the context. Nor does the aggregate set of lines between properties draw an appealing or meaningful picture.
Also the capital "I" in the font they're using is killing me.
Does anyone else find the font used on that page really distracting? What's with the I looking like a J?
I was going to say the same thing. The font is FF Schulbuch Süd Web Pro, and it looks like this: http://imgur.com/Uvft4 . I can't fathom why it's designed like that. (Link to FontShop: http://www.fontshop.com/fonts/singles/fontfont/ff_schulbuch_... )
http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Datei:La-ges.jpg
I am German (as is the name of the font) and I could read the article without being distracted.
