[OpenFontLibrary] Oflb.org

[Liam R E Quin]

On Fri, 2010-06-11 at 01:57 +0100, Dave Crossland wrote:
[...]
> So the text by the icons at the top saying "Get: Download Fonts,
> Share: Upload Your Fonts, Remix: Improve & Extend" isn't clear
> enough... okay.

The first thing I see on the page is an ugly red rectangle with,
Help the Open Font Library, that I actually didn't read first
time round, assuming it was asking for donations.

After that my eye was led to the huge 4 icons at the bottom
of the screen (there's no text visible under them unless I scroll).

Compare myfonts.com -
  obvious font samples

philsfont.com
    FRESHfonts and text samples


www.adobe.com/type
    nude picture of dave lemon. no, wait, font samples.

fontshop.com
    bright yellow, with an obvious font sample
    (frustratingly, when I clicked on one I liked,
    it took me to their blog) (and no, no picture
    of Erik)

www.fontsquirrel.com - says "only the best commercial
use free fonts" in big letters, and although it's an odd
phrase, there's a font sample for PT Sans that (here at
least) is half above the fold.

So OLFB is being avant garde and not having font samples on
the front page, and it's actually quite cool, but for me it's
a little not-obvious as to what it is.  I do not mean that
we should copy the other sites. But we should take away an
important lesson: make the purpose of the site obvious
at a glance, not as a result of reading text. Actually a picture
of a type designer at work with a screen showing sexy curves being
edited might work too :-)

I tuned out the navigation stuff at the very top altogether.
A note on these for longer term - only the active one should be
coloured, e.g. on http://openfontlibrary.org/files perhaps only the
Get one should be green? Or only the other two, maybe.

Hope this helps.

Suggest considering making the 4 huge icons half-size, to free
up space for a rotating font sample or graphic above them.

Thanks for the other changes!

It really _is_ looking massively better, the changes I'm suggesting are
I think small :) and I leave it up to you of course as to whether to
use them.

Best,

Liam


-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org