Hi, Jaclyn, looks like a fun client, and you have some nice graphic ideas working. My two cents' worth--take or leave with my blessing.
1. The light-on-dark text is optically very active. Look at the mailing list page. Compare the text in the form (dark on light) with the white-on-dark blue of the body text. Let your eyes go back and forth between the two areas, not reading the text, but just taking in the entire text area at once. Notice how the area with the white-on-dark text tends to sort of dance and strobe in your vision. The dark on light text is soooooo much easier on the eyes. If you really like the light-on-dark look, here are some things you can do to make the body text less optically active: a) increase the leading (line height) for the body text, and/or reduce the text size slightly b) reduce slightly the contrast between text and background. That is, make the text a light grey or tan instead of stark white. Play with the color 'til you have sufficient contrast to read easily, but not so much that it's optically active. A slightly heavier font or font weight may also help. Again, on the same page, look at the orange text in the animation--notice how much less optically active it is than the body text. Suggested reading (you may know him already): Edward Tufte, "Envisioning Information" and other books. Similarly, the white lines above and below the head graphic, and around the logo--because they contrast in value (light/dark) so greatly with the background, they stand out far more than their visual importance would merit. I would remove them, or screen them back heavily (darken them to some color that doesn't contrast so violently with the background). 2. I think the design may be breaking slightly on the home (what's on) page. I'm on Windows2000, IE 6. The top two rounded rectangles are breaking up around the titles. There are also some typographic inconsistencies (font weight of the orange titles) Beyond that -- to me, the orange rectangles, including the orange graphic at the bottom, are not needed, detract from the content they contain, and are making your life unnecessarily difficult. They also point a neon arrow at the alignment of the large elements of the layout--look at the bottom of the blocks for the first two plays--without the orange lines and graphics, one simply sees one text block with less text than the other. With the orange, one sees two graphics elements that look as though they want to align, but are failing to. Also: in each of the play listings, the boldface orange title is sort of fighting for attention with the same title, duplicated in white boldface below. Suggest you remove the orange titles currently on top, and make the existing white titles below orange instead. I guarantee each listing will have greater visual impact! a tip-- look at your layouts from across the room--from far enough away to see the layout instead of the individual words and graphics. What stands out at that distance is what you are giving visual weight to, intentionally or not. Viewed from across the room, in your layout, the bright orange and white lines would seem to be very important--the contrast makes them carry so much visual weight. When you screen them back, the logo and content will stand out better. yours, Elliott Stewart [EMAIL PROTECTED] > I know there's something wrong with the look of > the page(s) but I can't put my finger on it. > To unsubscribe send a blank email to %%email.unsub%% ____ � The WDVL Discussion List from WDVL.COM � ____ To Join wdvltalk, Send An Email To: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Send Your Posts To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To set a personal password send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the words: "set WDVLTALK pw=yourpassword" in the body of the email. To change subscription settings to the wdvltalk digest version: http://wdvl.internet.com/WDVL/Forum/#sub ________________ http://www.wdvl.com _______________________ You are currently subscribed to wdvltalk as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
