[Clipart] new site design in progress

[Jonadab the Unsightly One]

Alan Horkan <horkana at maths.tcd.ie> writes:

> The logo looks awfully like a fixed graphic.  I happen to very much
> like that in the current design all the text is text and that can be
> nicely enlarged as I see fit.

Oh, that.  I agree that the text "Open Clip Art Library" at the top
should be text.  I just didn't realize it wasn't that way.  Actually,
I'm still not sure; it's hard to tell in a screenshot.

> moving the search box down adds to the dead space.

The "dead" space doesn't bother me.  If anything, a little whitespace
(even (nay, especially) if it's not white per se) is a good thing in a
layout; it lets stuff breathe a little.  If you have no whitespace,
everything feels cramped.  (This can, of course, be overdone...)

> one column might be allright two columns designs are usually look
> terribly cluttered and disorganised.  they also result in a lot of
> dead space if the center column is longer than the sidebars (which
> it usually is).

How can you have a center column in a two-column design?  I'm not
following you.

I agree that if one column is much longer than the others, that's
bad, as you end up with rediculously wide margins on the bottom
three-quarters of the page.  A lot of news sites are like that, and it
always bugs me.

One solution is to take the bottom part of the long column out of the
columnar layout and put it below all the columns.  The only caveat
here is making sure you don't move _too much_ of the main column down
below, because if the main column is _shorter_ than the others that
gives the impression that it's done at that point, which is IMO bad.

On the screenshot, we're only seeing the top part of the page, so it's
really hard to comment on how the mockup handles this.

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