Forum .LRN Q&A: dotLRN design

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Posted by Lars Pind on
I had a graphic designer do some munging of the design of dotLRN, and here's what he came up with.

I must warn you, though, he's using shockwave flash to display the design. The upside is that you can use the arrow keys left and right to see different ways of writing the name. I really like the first one.

Have a look:

http://www.fandenivoldsk.dk/movie.html

We've been trying to implement it, but it's really, really tricky. Christian will be happy to rant at length about improper use of HTML, tables, half-hearted use of stylesheets, Tcl-code that spits out loads of malformed HTML, etc., etc., making it really, really hard to make the design look anything but trashed. :)

Oh, well, another big project for someone to do at some point down the road.

You can follow our experimentations here:

http://i18n.cph01.collaboraid.net/dotlrn/

Email: mailto:test@collaboraid.biz
Password: test

/Lars

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2: Re: dotLRN design (response to 1)
Posted by David Kuczek on
The desing looks very slick... I like the first and the last logo best. The last kinda reminds me of TV logos from the 70ies. Will the design be available with the toolkit?
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3: Re: dotLRN design (response to 2)
Posted by Jeff Davis on
I think my vote goes with the second one (blue underlined dot red LRN).
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4: Re: dotLRN design (response to 1)
Posted by Lars Pind on
So far, we haven't committed it anywhere, and as I said, there are many issues with the way dotLRN, and to a certain extent OpenACS in general, does presentation, that makes it very hard to implement this without plowing through the code and break other people's installations.

But we'll be more than happy to share what we have, and hopefully we (the community) can get around to doing something more thorough about OpenACS/dotLRN presentation and general UI, early in the new year.

I'd definitely love to see that happen.

/Lars

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5: Re: dotLRN design (response to 1)
Posted by Venkatesh Goteti on
Will we able to have sets of themes like these available, not as part of the toolkit, but as packages/files where others in the community? Also,  are there guidelines for creating themes and adding them on to some place in the community for ppl use ones they like? This way we can create a culture where diffferent companies/individuals contribute themes/skins that are available for all to use.
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6: Re: dotLRN design (response to 1)
Posted by Lars Pind on
Venk,

I'd love to see that happen, but I think it'll be subject to a major clean-up effort by the community. Some of the thinking and groundwork is being laid by people like Dave Bauer and Jeff Davis, and I'd love to contribute to that as well, but it's going to take a great deal of work before we get there.

/Lars

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7: Re: dotLRN design (response to 6)
Posted by Bjorn Thor Jonsson on
Maybe some ideas can be gotten from how phpBB handles multiple styles?:  http://www.phpbb.com/styles/
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8: Re: dotLRN design (response to 7)
Posted by Jeff Davis on
I especially like this page
http://www.phpbb.com/styles/graphics.php
I think having a catalog of all the images used
and directory of css classes and IDs will go a
long way towards allowing people to do themeing.

My goal is to make themes just be tar or zip files that can
be dropped into place and picked up automatically.
Obviously we won't get there with all modules but
I would like to see a core set of modules with
a consistent "design API" in the sense of common image
files and consistent class naming and such.

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9: Re: dotLRN design (response to 8)
Posted by Carl Robert Blesius on
Having a catalog of all images (and css) used with "consistent class naming and such" will probably need to be done for the i18n work too (luckily for us there are not too many images in dotLRN right now).
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10: Re: dotLRN design (response to 9)
Posted by Venkatesh Goteti on
Am just curious, has there been any progress in terms of development in this direction? I am particularly keen on knowing if anyone has been implementing themes/skins effectively, not just under different subsites, but, if it is possible to wrap a skin around each individual package, not just adding a theme for a user/class/club alone. Would be glad to look up any info in this regard.