A scant six weeks after presenting our design choices to the Developing Library group, the Design and Development Teams at last sat down together to hammer out the details for which each were dependent on the other.
The Design Team learned that the Development Team had chosen the Omeka theme “Berlin”, which we found…unappealing. The Development Team assured us that the choice was based on functionality, not style, as almost all stylistic elements in the theme could be adapted, which we found very reassuring.
We were tasked with nailing down the color scheme, font, and main page design. Our earlier color scheme of charcoal grey background, with red and yellow accents, as found at the Jan Breughel Wiki page, had been questioned by the Development Team, given the difficulty, on text-heavy pages, of reading light text on a dark background. We agreed that that was a problem, but didn’t find it an insurmountable problem. The Brueghel Wiki deals with it by lightening the grey where there’s a preponderance of text; we felt that we could even create a frame for the text that would allow us to present it as black on white, within the framework of the charcoal grey background. So, for now, charcoal grey with red and yellow remains our color scheme, and we will be amending the logos to reflect that choice.
Menu tabs at the top of the main map image remain our choice, as well. We are still fans of the Medici Archive Project site, with its menu tabs above the main images. We are also fans of the Mapping Gothic France main page, with its prominent main image, its text box that can be minimized so as not to obscure that image, its hovertext, and its minimalist footer. To our great delight, we discovered that the Mapping Gothic France site, which is a Columbia project, is on GitHub, allowing us to mine its source code.
The big decision for the day was….FONT. So much of a site’s visual impact relies on the font! We knew we wanted a serif font, one that looked old-fashioned, like 19th-century newstype. We played around with filters on Google Fonts without success–until, appropriately enough, the team-member who sits on both Design AND Development discovered the font with which we all fell in love: Old Standard TT. We played with it in Google Fonts, typing the names of each of our topics to see how they looked in the font, and we remained excited. This felt like a huge, huge step forward.
The Design Team also has the responsibility of delivering a design for item pages, but the two teams agreed that this would best be done collaboratively, once the Development Team has started building the site based on the specs thus far.
It felt like a good meeting!
