Re: [Chicken-users] Wiki design

[Matt Gushee]

Hello--

On Thu, Aug 28, 2014 at 11:44 PM, Yaroslav Tsarko
<address@hidden> wrote:

> The screenshots you`ve provided all look well to me. The only thing I`d like
> to mention is the width of central part of the page - why is it so short?
> For 1920 display resolution it is about 1050 pixels width (about 55%) of the
> screen. Why don`t use more space? Let`s make it occupy, say 75% of screen
> width to allow more content to fit there.

I agree that a somewhat wider body would *look* better on a wide
screen - but at the cost of readability. While there is no definite
line length that is right for every situation, designers generally
agree, with support from empirical research, that a moderate line
length is best. A common rule of thumb is 50-60 characters.

Here's one article from a prominent design site that discusses this
issue: http://alistapart.com/article/more-meaningful-typography. A
quick search will turn up many more references.

The current Chicken site (in production) has 116 characters per line.
The proposed redesign, with its looser letter spacing (which, by the
way, I disagree with, but that's a separate email) will reduce that a
bit, but I think it is still over 100.

> In the attachent you will find
> screenshot of Pastiche service we are using in our company - mostly for
> pasting logs - and due to its narrow look there is very huge horizontal
> scroll on it. In the attachments you will find original look of pastiche
> page with a very long log opened in it (pastiche-1.png) and modified version
> of the chicken.css where central part is made 1440px (75% of screen width) -
> looks much more attractive (to me, at least :) ).

I don't disagree, but it should be noted that reading lines in a log
file is quite different from reading paragraphs of normal text.

--
Matt Gushee