Aesthetic Considerations

[Man in Space]

I was doing some thinking about what the ID site should look like. (I’ve already reserved and parked a domain.) Couple options, depending on what we want:

- MediaWiki. FOSS, customizable, simple enough to install, but would it be the best option for categorizing and organizing entries?
- Omeka. It’s literally designed to handle citations and digital collections, but I don’t know if it’s the right format for what we want to do.
- A template from Envato or something. There’s so many options, though…and if you’re doing something in it you’ll be dealing with HTML sooner or later, and there’s a bit of a learning curve.
- An old-school HTML theme using Bootstrap. (This is what I do for my LCS hosting.) Simple, no frills, but a bit of a learning curve.
- Something homebrewed. Maybe cheap, but time- and labor-intensive.

That aside, I would suggest dark mode, at least as a default. It would be easier on my eyes, and I think it’d have a distinctive look and feel to it.

As for fonts, we need something with good Unicode support. IPA at the very least, and the more characters and writing systems, the better, in regards to citing examples/sources/native scripts. I’ll have take a closer look at it, but Iosevka seems like a good choice—simple, no-nonsense, distinct, and (importantly) freely available for use. We could always call Helvetica or something, but that depends on the user having it installed or paying for a license, and IIRC the SIL fonts have strings attached that may make them less than optimal for use.

[bradrn]

(I’ve already reserved and parked a domain.)

Ooh, thanks! Link it please?

- MediaWiki. FOSS, customizable, simple enough to install, but would it be the best option for categorizing and organizing entries?
- Omeka. It’s literally designed to handle citations and digital collections, but I don’t know if it’s the right format for what we want to do.

I don’t know about theming, but I feel strongly that we should build our own content management system rather than using prebuilt solutions. Keeping all our data consistent, cross-referenced and searchable would be a major pain using something like MediaWiki.

As for how to make it… well, I’ve already built a sound change parser for my Brassica SCA, and that should be flexible enough to reuse for this project. Given that, it would be pretty easy to write a program which converts sound change descriptions to static webpages like the ones I’ve been making manually.

That aside, I would suggest dark mode, at least as a default. It would be easier on my eyes, and I think it’d have a distinctive look and feel to it.

Good idea, though I’d like to keep it as simple as possible to start off with.

As for fonts, we need something with good Unicode support. IPA at the very least, and the more characters and writing systems, the better, in regards to citing examples/sources/native scripts.

I feel it’s easiest to just use the default fonts for each OS. But as for your choices:

I’ll have take a closer look at it, but Iosevka seems like a good choice—simple, no-nonsense, distinct, and (importantly) freely available for use.

Iosevka is indeed quite nice, but I’m not sure how I feel using a monospaced font which is intended for programming. It could work well, but it could also look terrible. Perhaps we should just try it and see!

EDIT: After further thought, this could actually be a really good idea. For the webpages I’ve made so far, I feel that adjacent symbols sometimes blur into each other a bit. A monospaced font would avoid that, since spaces are nice and wide. (And it doesn’t even have to be truly monospaced: Iosevka has two quasi-proportional subfamilies which also have wide spacing.)

IIRC the SIL fonts have strings attached that may make them less than optimal for use.

I’m not sure what you’re talking about here. They’re licensed under the OFL (the same license as Iosevka!), which allows pretty broad use. And, when it comes to well-designed Latin fonts with a large character range, Gentium and Charis are both pretty great.

[Man in Space]

I’m not sure what you’re talking about here. They’re licensed under the OFL (the same license as Iosevka!), which allows pretty broad use. And, when it comes to well-designed Latin fonts with a large character range, Gentium and Charis are both pretty great.

Hm. I thought there were more restrictions. I must have remembered wrong.

[bradrn]

For my latest mockup I tried switching to Iosevka. I’m not entirely decided on whether I like the result or not.

[Darren]

For my latest mockup I tried switching to Iosevka. I’m not entirely decided on whether I like the result or not.

I like it.

[Man in Space]

For my latest mockup I tried switching to Iosevka. I’m not entirely decided on whether I like the result or not.

I like it.

Seconded. (Though when I loaded it today, it seemed the font was reverted; I did see it earlier though.)

[SquiDark]

For fonts, I highly recommend Cambria, It can take whatever diacritics and it's included in Microsoft!

too bad it's not monospaced.

[bradrn]

For fonts, I highly recommend Cambria, It can take whatever diacritics and it's included in Microsoft!

On the other hand, it’s not included in Mac or Linux — and I believe the fonts we’ve mentioned have far greater character coverage than Cambria does. (Also, I just don’t really love it as a typeface.)

[SquiDark]

For fonts, I highly recommend Cambria, It can take whatever diacritics and it's included in Microsoft!

On the other hand, it’s not included in Mac or Linux — and I believe the fonts we’ve mentioned have far greater character coverage than Cambria does. (Also, I just don’t really love it as a typeface.)

Ah bummer

[Zju]

If the design was up to me, I'd remove borders between areas of different colours, and I'd replace 90deg corners of said areas with rounded corners. Some greater padding and nicer to the eye font wouldn't hurt, either.

[bradrn]

If the design was up to me, I'd remove borders between areas of different colours, and I'd replace 90deg corners of said areas with rounded corners. Some greater padding and nicer to the eye font wouldn't hurt, either.

I can’t imagine how that would result in anything other than a totally illegible page where everything blurs into each other. (Keeping in mind that I have colourblindness.) Could you perhaps do a mockup of what you’re thinking?

As for the font, that was Man in Space’s suggestion earlier in this thread (Iosevka).

[Man in Space]

If the design was up to me, I'd remove borders between areas of different colours, and I'd replace 90deg corners of said areas with rounded corners. Some greater padding and nicer to the eye font wouldn't hurt, either.

I can’t imagine how that would result in anything other than a totally illegible page where everything blurs into each other. (Keeping in mind that I have colourblindness.) Could you perhaps do a mockup of what you’re thinking?

As for the font, that was Man in Space’s suggestion earlier in this thread (Iosevka).

I think something broke on the site because when I visited it again it was in Times New Roman.

[bradrn]

If the design was up to me, I'd remove borders between areas of different colours, and I'd replace 90deg corners of said areas with rounded corners. Some greater padding and nicer to the eye font wouldn't hurt, either.

I can’t imagine how that would result in anything other than a totally illegible page where everything blurs into each other. (Keeping in mind that I have colourblindness.) Could you perhaps do a mockup of what you’re thinking?

As for the font, that was Man in Space’s suggestion earlier in this thread (Iosevka).

I think something broke on the site because when I visited it again it was in Times New Roman.

Oh dear, so it is. That would be because I was being lazy and including Iosevka via its official website, which isn’t actually supported for using it as a webfont. It would appear they’ve changed the filename on their side, which broke the link from this page. But at this point, I won’t bother fixing it.

[Zju]

If the design was up to me, I'd remove borders between areas of different colours, and I'd replace 90deg corners of said areas with rounded corners. Some greater padding and nicer to the eye font wouldn't hurt, either.

I can’t imagine how that would result in anything other than a totally illegible page where everything blurs into each other. (Keeping in mind that I have colourblindness.) Could you perhaps do a mockup of what you’re thinking?

As for the font, that was Man in Space’s suggestion earlier in this thread (Iosevka).

Very quick and dirty mockup (just the font is kept the same):

(top is the current design, bottom is the suggestion)
(the forum does some weird scaling, but if you open the link directly, it should display alright: https://i.imgur.com/a5V0sLP.png)

[bradrn]

OK, that’s not too bad. Note, of course, that we can tweak the styling at any time.