Forum:Site fonts: your opinion needed
If this thread's title doesn't specify it's spoilery, don't bring any up.
Now that we've all had a few months to live with the changes to the site fonts, I wanted to revisit the issue. How do you like the font setup in the wikia skin? Some people were initially resistant to a serif font for the main body font, and others didn't initially warm to all-caps section header fonts.
What do you think now of the overall typographic design of the site, now that we've been on this font scheme for a few months now? Do you think it looks better or worse than the default Wikia fonts seen on most other Wikia wikis? Are there things you'd change about it?
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ <span style="">20:31: Tue 11 Oct 2011
I don't notice it, which is my personal definition of a good font. Boblipton talk to me 20:52, October 11, 2011 (UTC)
- I still haven't really warmed to the all-caps section headers to be honest, I remain of the mind that all-caps online constitutes SHOUTING. I dig the rest of the design, though; the font is easy on the eyes, and the layout in general flows quite nicely. — Rob T Firefly - Δ∇ - 20:56, October 11, 2011 (UTC)
- I'm also in agreement with Rob T Firefly, the section headers, while I understand they're technically not actually in uppercase, they are. With the even quicker preview window you more quickly see the difference between plain text and what you get, and the headings are one of those jarring things.
- I also haven't really warmed to the purple/blue background to the edit box, it was one of the things I was happy wasn't working when we were having Firefox issues. --Tangerineduel / talk 13:13, October 12, 2011 (UTC)
- I actually don't min the section headers, but if they ae changed to show upper and lowercase then please keep them blue and fairly large, unlike once when they were black and you could barely tell the distinction between headers. Can I also ask that the navboxes at the bottom of pages be collapsable again? Glimmer721 talk to me 20:51, October 16, 2011 (UTC)
Responding to these suggestions
Thanks very much for these thoughts. The big issue, then, seems to be the sectional headings. I've now changed them to all lowercase. The issue for me is that they have to be either all lower or all upper. The reason for this is that editors over the year have been very inconsistent with capitalisation of header text. Making them go all upper or all lower instantly provides a uniformity that simply can't be achieved by going with normal sentence case.
Of course, I realise that the MOS says that we should be using sentence case in headers, and that still applies even with enforced cap styling. It's important to have sentence case so that people can know how to perform sectional links. (Linking to Companion#Species and gender works, while Companion#Species and Gender doesn't, even though both provide apparent blue-links.)
However, I can't think of a quick way to make the bot enforce sentence case. There's probably a way, but it would involve writing a specialised regular expression for it, and I'm just not that regex-savvy yet. So the quickest, easiest way to make everything appear to be uniform is just to enforce cap styling.
We've had it all upper case for a while, so now let's give lowercase a shot. I'd appreciate your comments on whether you think this is an improvement.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ <span style="">02:40: Wed 30 Nov 2011
- Lower case is worse than upper case. Uppercase at least has the aesthetic of a heading, lowercase just looks…weird and not a heading.
- I sort of understand your annoyance by the inconsistent use of headings, but isn't that down to the fact we've gone through a fairly fluid/lax period where we haven't had anything written down as to how it should be?
- Now that it is written down, spelled out and stated clearly can't we just have it upper and lower case and rely on people to understand the MOS? Education rather than bot enforcement? --Tangerineduel / talk 12:58, November 30, 2011 (UTC)
- I'm inclined to agree with Tangerineduel. All-caps online is shouty, but all-lowercase suggests laziness or squeaky ickle baby voices which is worse. Additionally, it forces bad grammar where proper nouns are concerned.
- If we absolutely must have one or the other I'd suggest going back to caps, but I do think it'd be best to just leave it in sentence case as-written and educate users about the MoS. — Rob T Firefly - Δ∇ - 20:28, November 30, 2011 (UTC)
