[Haskell-cafe] The Haskell theme

[Christopher Done]

On 13 October 2010 05:49, Mark Lentczner <markl at glyphic.com> wrote:
>  I spent some time beforehand looking at what other successful language communities do w.r.t. visual design. I found that none of the communities had a single theme; most had two or three. but these themes were visually harmonious. Furthermore, I found that they were used consistently, and that the various themes were generally at the same level of "polish".

Just out of interest, can you show some examples? A cursory glance at
Ruby, and I see that the home page[1] and their package site[2] are
completely different!

[1]: http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/
[2]: http://rubyforge.org/

> This means leaning toward consistent colors, and logo form, rather than exact layout. Further, it seems more important that our projects get designers who will do a thorough job, and less important that it be a single "central design group".

Indeed.

> It is no accident that the new Haddock backend looks like the new wiki design: Thomas Schilling (nominolo) supplied the initial style sheet that the Haddock team used to build the "Ocean" theme. I think this exemplifies what we should strive for: The two projects look well together, look like they have a relationship, and both are full treatments of their subjects. It isn't so important that they have identical layouts or details.

Ah, I didn't notice! I see that there is a navy blue bar at the top, a
grey footer and the links are orange. This is generally good enough, I
suppose. Nice.

> Since parts of the Hackage site integrate so closely with the Haddock output, I've been asked if I would take a stab at styling the new Hackage (or at least the package pages). I'll be aiming to make that fit, but without being 100% rigid about conformance to the Ocean output.

Wwe could provide a base stylesheet which provides fonts, colours,
spacing, the heading and footer and logo. That way when you or anyone
starts on a new site you already have the base style upon which to
built, it will look like Haskell whatever layout or content you use.

>> http://img840.imageshack.us/img840/3577/ideasv.png
>
> Lovely ideas there and I think a Haskell project built on those lines would continue to look well with the wiki and Haddock.

Can we use this logo? Or can we pick one? Every site I see has a
different incarnation of it. The favicon of the new-www site is even
different to the logo that's on the left. In fact on the new-www site
the logo colour changes from the home page to sub pages!

This reminds me, do we have a good syntax highlighting theme?
HsColour's has always been pretty bad (no offence intended -- but
there is a reason people always redefine it).

> I'd lean toward us putting these thoughts down in the wiki, and developing a set of "guide posts" for styling Haskell, rather than a strict set of policies.

This sounds like a good idea. The Python site has a page like this[3],
ours could be a little more comprehensive regarding the "polish", as
you say.

[3]: http://python.org/community/logos/