css and color -- pt I — OZONE Asylum, home of the Mad Scientists

css and color -- pt I

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Your Text: Insert Slimies » Insert UBB Code » Close Last Tag \| All Tags UBB Help	Without first reading Drac's comments (so there may be some overlap), here are mine: [b]Layout:[/b] [i]Is it clean and attractive?[/i] I've honestly got to say no to this one. First off, I would not consider this a "clean" layout--it is simply too cluttered. You've got text running way too close to the edges of your boxes, and your boxes have too little space between them. The layout has no room to breathe, and it leaves me with a stuffy, claustrophobic feeling. You need white space on the page so that the various elements can be put into their proper perspective. [i]Does it lead your eye to the relevant parts of the page?[/i] As I alluded to above, it is very difficult to distinguish the elements from each other because of the lack of white space. My first impression upon seeing the page was one of being overwhelmed by the flood of text. It took me a few seconds to get a grip on the layout and figure out where I needed to start processing information. (I did not figure out what the 'featuredNav' div was supposed to be until I looked at the code--this may be because there was no content, though.) [i]Does it make you want to stick around and read or run like hell?[/i] Unfortunately, I'm going to have to lean toward the latter. My heart rate actually increased when the page first loaded, due to the sensory overload I mentioned above. I most likely would have stuck around long enough to see what the content was like, and if it was your usual stuff I would have probably suffered with the design to read through it. But it would not have been a pleasant experience. [b]Color:[/b] [i]I've never been much of a color man before. This is my first exploration into really thinking about color and making something coherent and purposeful.[/i] OK, I don't particularly like this color scheme, and I think it's the gray that's throwing me off. The yellow, peach and maroon (I'm generalizing here) don't seem to clash, but the gray seems to stick out. I'm very intuitive when it comes to color (ie, I can't really explain why it is that something works or does not work for me), so I'm not sure how much help I'm going to be here. As for readability, everything is fine except for the peach--white is a bit difficult to read on it. Black would be easier on the eyes, but I'm not sure how it would fit with the design. It has also just occured to me that the black background bothers me a bit, too. Perhaps it is having the soft colors on such a solid black that it throwing things off for me. [b]CSS/coding:[/b] [i]I've looked at this thing in IE 5.5 and NN 6.0, both on Windows machines. So far it works as expected. The results from any other devices, browsers or operating systems would be much appreciated. This is a fairly complicated CSS layout (at least it was for me!) but I think I pulled it off. Please tell me what you think and where it can be improved.[/i] Well, I'm using IE6/Win, and everything seems to be working fine. The code itself (both HTML and CSS) looks pretty clean, so no complaints there. There is one other area I would like to mention, though... [b]Typography[/b] You seem to have set up a convention where title text is set in a serif font and body text is set in a sans serif font, but it ends up looking a bit arbitrary. I think this is because all of the text in the left-hand div is set in serif. Also, the line-spacing in the 'featuredNav' div really seems to throw everything off, especially since the div has absolutely no vertical padding (and very little horizontal padding). Your paragraphs are huge, monstrous blocks of text that are not in any way pleasant to look at. [b]Recommendations:[/b] First off, whitespace. I'm looking at your old site, and I see that your paragraphs there are also huge, monstrous blocks of text. But they are far more readable because they have space around them. You definitely need more whitespace here, and in creating whitespace you will be forced to focus on certain elements of the site, which can only be a good thing. Secondly, you might want to mess around with the color a bit. As it is now, things are a tad jarring. Definitely check for readability, especially with the peach. I think the primary problem, though, is that the site is just too cluttered. Work on that first. Sorry to give such a negative review. Hopefully it will help. [Edit: And after reading Drac's comments: very good points on paragraph line height and color.] [img]http://liminality.org/asylum/sigs/[/img] [url=http://www.liminality.org]www.liminality.org[/url] Loading...
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