I'm going to be a little forward here, and say that the base font for the redesign is too small and should be increased. 0.75em is generally for minor text, not for large blocks of primary text. 0.8em in Verdana is typically the low end, so 0.75em in Arial is just tiny. Since the bulk of the purpose of the Drupal.org site is reading pages and pages of text on forum threads, issue queues and documentation, I'd say this is a big problem.
Relatedly, the theme does not support gracefully increasing the size of the font through your browser. The header in particular starts to break as well as the homepage. Across the website, there are too many elements with a fixed height that won't gracefully expand to contain their contents.
There are two possible solutions:
Preferably, I'd like both. Even if we do have a more standard base font size, we should support those who are hard of sight to at least two factors above the base, and gracefully degrade beyond that.
Otherwise, I fear if we don't solve this problem we'll have a lot of users who will have a degraded design experience because the font size forces them to bump up the font with their browser.
| Comment | File | Size | Author |
|---|---|---|---|
| #13 | bluecheese-font-size-509050.patch | 9.61 KB | kjay |
| #10 | broken.gif | 33.52 KB | kaakuu |
Comments
Comment #1
todd nienkerk commentedThe theme needs to be expandable regardless of whether we increase the base font size. Let's limit this issue to font size and create a new issue for the expandable theme.
Comment #2
ruharen commentedI don't think the font is too tiny. I am able to read it even with screen resolutions of 1400 or 1600 px. so I don't think "a lot of users" will have a degraded experience.
Comment #3
jwilson3I disagree as well. Upping the base font size to 80% from 75% (in firebug) didn't really do anything positive for readability and certainly throws off a lot of the other elements on the page due mostly to vertical layout issues.
I also think that making the theme have better support for flexible / user customized font sizes should be another thread.
I'm moving this thread to Blue Cheese issue queue. Please start filing issues there.\
Edit: the flexible font size has its own issue now: #537602: Theme should support resizing fonts
Comment #4
jwilson3Comment #5
todd nienkerk commentedRemoving the old "Bluecheese theme" tag so we can retire it.
Comment #6
aaron stanush commentedWe'll need to move forward using the font size outlined in the style guide. Once the site is launched, if we discover that readability is at risk for large bodies of text (e.g. news, documentation) we can address them then. I think it's more important that this base size be sane (which 12px is) and that we properly support text resizing without breaking the layout (issue #537602 above). Marking this issue as "by design."
Comment #7
michelleAh, too bad. Looks like I'll have to be hitting control-scroll every time I come to d.o, which is about a bazillion times a day. :( I just took a peek at the redesign site and my eyes were screaming in pain after just a few minutes.
Michelle
Comment #8
rfayReadability is already at risk. I think every comment I've heard is negative, and my own experience is negative.
api.scratch.drupal.org, with the new theme, is very difficult to use.
Comment #9
drummI talked with Mark Boulton about this at DrupalCon CPH. Raising everything that is 12pt, including general body text and h4-6, is doable. Larger font sizes should stay the same.
The CSS isn't doing us any favors, the base font size is 0.75em, making everything 12pt, and then some tags are sized up using ems. So, keeping other font sizes the same will require changing all the relative sizing.
Aaron and Todd wanted to make the base font size 10pt, to keep the math easy, and making sure everything had some sizing in EMs.
Unfortunately, this is more CSS work than simply changing one rule.
Comment #10
kaakuu commentedIncrease the font size.
- People are used to the current font size in drupal.org. There has been no complaint or feedback regarding the font or font-size to change it.
- People who are visiting the drupal.org from non-drupal background like wordpress, modx, silverstripe etc are used to larger font-size. Their normal user expectancy is broken when they visit redesigned site for the first time.
If one manually zooms or makes the font-size large the visual appearance is completely broken. People who are accustomed to current font size or comes from non-drupal background like Wordpress may need to increase the font size from browser unless we already increase it in the design. This breaks the content and makes things unreadable. See screenshot taken by manually increasing the font size of redesign site to current font size of drupal.org in firefox. See in the attachment please.
Comment #11
drummI need to set a hard deadline on this; changing the font size will cause a lot to shift around, hindering debugging and QA work. An at-least beta-quality patch must be done by Friday, September 24. #9 is the comment to read for what to do.
#10 - most browser zoom today is full page, not fonts only, http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/01/the-two-types-of-browser-zoom.html. It would be nice to have font-only zoom work, but not a priority.
Comment #12
kjay commentedAssigning
Comment #13
kjay commentedHere is a patch that revises all font sizing to be based on a base font size of 13 pixels as opposed to 12px. All elements sized greater than 12px, (eg. H1, H2 etc) have had their em sizing adjusted to retain their original font sizes. In nearly all other cases, all other font sizes have been scaled up by 1 pixel in each case.
I have also adjusted margins where essential to do so in order to retain vertical positioning of elements where em's have been used for layout.
The maths is obviously a little untidy with rounding and so on but the moderate cross browser checks I have done seem to imply that everything holds together well.
Over to others to review and comment!
Comment #14
drummThe specific details I looked into are generally good. Committed.