I think we (myself included) have been mixing up at least two different questions, both worth thinking about, but the original one is getting lost in the second. Scott was asking about putting together a graphic identity. This is a design product that doesn't require coding (though of course coding will be required to implement it for any given web site). I agree with Neal that the graphic identity can be based on what we already have on the kbase.us site. From that, a capable designer should be able to codify the design requirements for a kbase identity. This is not the same as a graphic design for any given site, however; it's a guide setting forth the few things we want to require across all media. It usually includes guidance on how the logo is used, a color palette, possibly a typeface, and any special treatments that need to be consistent. If we are also interested in thinking about how the narrative UI should look, that will require a bit of design work, using the look of kbase.us but making it work for the narrative interface. At this point, we're not even sure what belongs on the landing page for the narrative UI. I think it's useful to start to think about it, but it doesn't make sense to try and do a detailed graphic design for something when we don't know the content yet. At this stage, we are just aiming for something on which we can do some testing. If people feel that we need to have a formal design for the February demos, and I imagine that would be a good idea, I would recommend that we involve a graphic designer to get an identity right away. I think people coding up demos can take the kbase.ui site and the smoothness jquery UI theme as patterns for putting something together until we have more firm guidance. I will also request that you modularize your front-end code sufficiently that it can be used with a modified graphic design. This is good practice anyway, of course. In general, you can't go wrong keeping things simple. I think the other question, of what libraries to use for coding the UI, should be taken up by a group that comprises all the people who will be coding the UI. This also seems like something worth deciding soon. Are all the people who see themselves as coding the UI on the kbase-ui list? -Annette On Nov 19, 2012, at 2:27 PM, Adam Arkin wrote:

Good conversation, all. Hm... I do think we need a plan/policy for how UI or at least skinning for KBase Labs/etc. for February and I don't think we have an institutional plan for doing that yet.

Nomi, Annette, Jim-- do you feel comfortable pushing out the JQueryUI/Smoothness choice to the group for stage 1 demos? Does anyone object to this technology/CSS for the near term (capuccino aside)?

We have a serious decision to make here-- will domains go with a KBase Labs approach to their demos where canned pages, widgets, etc are deployed that show basic capability and a few useful packaged functions-- or will we try some sort of integrated pre-beta version of Narrative? The latter seems a slim chance unless Jim tells me otherwise. If we go with the former-- do we still need to spec look and feel and basic scope for the created pages/apps?

Third-- I am happy to foot the bill for graphic design if we can identify a scope of work and a small team to advise them.

Adam

On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 1:19 PM, Christopher Henry <[email protected]> wrote:

...

I don't really think it's "early". Shouldn't this have been the first thing we did?

I understand that the UI team isn't planning to produce anything for the February demo, but that doesn't mean we won't have a UI by the demo. We've had to bootstrap up temporary UIs ourselves, because we do need to have a UI at the demo, and a lot of people are going to see that UI. Like it or not, that's going to set the look and feel of KBase to a certain extent… Lots of users are going to see and start using the demo system. This is one reason why I really wanted to encourage UI people to try and produce *something* by the demo even if it's not the final product… not sure if that's in the plan at the moment.

If there's some way we can come to some decisions now to frame and standardize the look and feel of our UIs…. that will help the KBase demo have a common look and feel, and it will prevent us from completely jarring our fledgling user community with the first UI team prototypes start to emerge.

-Chris

On Nov 19, 2012, at 3:04 PM, Annette Greiner <[email protected]> wrote:

...

The UI team has not been planning on going to the build, because we were told that the work was going to focus on code development and we should let the developers do that work. If there were discussion of the look and feel of the site, we would of course want to be involved.

It's a little early to worry about the graphics (the look) for the narrative UI, though we could certainly start thinking about it. The UI design team has been focusing on the interaction design (the feel) thus far. For the look, we are recommending JQuery smoothness as a temporary, neutral theme so that we can show and test the feel without influence from the look. I would recommend that KBase use a professional graphic designer for developing the final graphic identity. Maybe someone with purse strings--Adam?--can clarify what the plan is in that regard.

-Annette

On Nov 19, 2012, at 12:04 PM, Thomason, James wrote:

...

At least some of that stuff is already going ahead, or is being worked on in sub-groups already.

I've been building the narrative in JqueryUI, for example. The UIx team is defining a lot more of the look-and-feel side of things (e.g., the recommendation is to use the smoothness jqueryui theme). They're also gathering feedback from the users and are planning on getting more, as I get useable stuff churned out. So a lot of the look-and-feel will end up evolving over time.

For a CSS doc, if we don't end up using a standard jqui theme, then a custom one through there will define most of the styles anyway.

At the moment, at least, if you're building in jqueryui and using the smoothness theme, then you're close to the overall look and feel of where the narrative is.

I'm not opposed to a side-table, but it might end up being more of a show-and-share from the UI subgroups than a free-for-all to define stuff. Or maybe there's lots of stuff that can be defined. I can say that I'm very strongly in favor of jqueryui, but don't really care what fonts or colors we end up with, for example.

On Nov 19, 2012, at 1:50 PM, Scott Devoid <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:

There was discussion during today's microbe's call about holding a brief side-table during the build week to go over the web-UI look and feel.

The goal of this side-table would be to define an initial "graphic identity" for the KBase web UI. At the very least this would include choice of fonts, color palette, use of the logo. Hopefully we can also come to agreement on a basic UI look (e.g. Twitter Bootstrap or jQuery UI) and then codify things in a standard CSS document. This shouldn't take more than an hour.

Does this sound like a good idea? Who would be interested in participating (particularly those who are not coming to Chicago for the build week)?

Example of basic graphic identity statements: http://identity.uchicago.edu/ http://mit.edu/graphicidentity/ http://www.identity.ucla.edu/

~ Scott

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