Organizing layouts

[denise]

We've been talking a bit about how the Select Style page should be categorized and laid out as we get more and more styles added (and OMG, I am loving the styles that we've been adding!), so it is time to discuss how we should categorize things.

afuna and I have already been talking about a few options, but I wanted to throw it out to the community at large to see what you guys think first, before we talk about what we've been thinking, to see if anyone has any great ideas that we would have missed!

To that end, a poll:

Poll #1158 Layout choice

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 313

View Respondents

When looking for a design for your journal, how do you expect to be able to browse/select one?

View Answers

By color family
171 (54.6%)

By color contrast
37 (11.8%)

By font size
23 (7.3%)

By base layout
282 (90.1%)

By header image content
66 (21.1%)

By something else (explain in comments!)
15 (4.8%)

Discussions, ideas, pros-and-cons, and other thoughts go in the comments. :)

Comments

[ratcreature]

The most common thing is that many layouts produce a weird horizontal scrollbar. Even if the main box is sized so that the journal itself fits on my screen okay (the flexible width part I guess), I get a scrollbar that is not needed to scroll anything in the blog, but my toolbar can't be used anymore, because it is also as wide as this imaginary width the layout seems to want, so I have to horizontally scroll to use the right side parts. This layout does this for example.

ETA: Transmogrified (like in the dw-suggestions com) does it too, though less extreme (i.e. the toolbar is stretched out less, but still significantly wider than my window while the journal itself fits).

[zvi]

Do you have the navbar turned on? Because it's a table, it's less liquid than almost every other element in the system styles. Unfortunately, we don't yet have wizard control of the navbar, but if you apply CSS to #lj_controlstrip , you can reduce the font, which is the only thing that will reduce the width. :(

[cesy]

*tests*

Yes, it appears to be the navbar/toolbar that causes this. *makes a note in Bugzilla*

[afuna]

Hmm, interesting. With what browser/screen resolution?

[cesy]

IE7 and FF3, though you have to go narrower in IE7 before you hit the problem. You can reproduce it by resizing the browser window to be about 800px wide in FF or 600px in IE.

[afuna]

Oh! I see it now (I was looking at the wrong thing before) thanks!

[zvi]

I actually get this problem a lot, even though I'm at 1600x1200, because I usually have a minimum font size of 16px to 20px. It's a small enough sidescroll that I mostly don't process it, but it is some horizontal scrolling.

(FF 3 and the current Epiphany in Ubuntu)

[ratcreature]

I don't want a smaller font on my toolbar. That would be worse. I don't need huge fonts or anything, but truly tiny ones suck for me, and the current font size the navbar displays is already the smallest I allow in my browser, which is 14.

[afuna]

Hm. We want to fix it on our end (and will try to figure out how) but as a temporary solution, you can hide bits and pieces of the navbar, like so, which hides the search bar at the right, and may give you a little more room to play with:

#lj_controlstrip_search form { display: none; }

Unfortunately, that will only work with your journal or style=mine.

[ratcreature]

Well, naturally I picked a journal style for my own in which the navbar looks okay, so I don't need to fix it there anyway. It's not a significant problem for me because I rarely look at journals in their style. I just answered because I was asked what was wrong for me with some layouts on my small screen that was okay with other layouts.

[afuna]

Thank you for telling us! We'll see about getting that fixed so that eventually you'll have a wider range of choices for styles, too :)