Fwd: Re: Typography HIG

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Monday, November 19, 2012 13:45:42 Sebastian Kügler wrote:
> In general I'd like to see font size used as primary means for distinction
> between levels, bold font usage should be reduced to an absolute minimum

on smaller screens, a benefit of using bold rather than larger font sizes is 
you get more compact presentations.

in any case, i think we should focus on how we implement this so that it is 
consistent across Plasma Active and then try out various approaches and 
measure how they work in practice.

> Capitalization should not be used at all, this leads to "screaming
> UIs". Translucent fonts are a good means for "additional info" or secondary

using translucency has the downside of being .. well .. see-through :) 
a solid color would probably give more consistent results, assuming the themes 
set this correctly.

> In our code, I think these typography guidelines need to be implemented in
> two ares: Plasma::Theme::styleSheet() and in PlasmaExtras.

Plasma::Theme::FontRole should probably also be extended.

> About half a year ago, we introduced a number of components in Plasma Quick
> that allow us to style text consistently. It's based on text structure and
> contains Title, Heading (of level 1 to 5) and Paragraph and they all inherit
> from PlasmaComponents.Label.

yes, use of these components as well as modifying the text usage in buttons / 
tabs / etc should get us most of the way there. i expect we'll find areas in 
our UI that are using custom components that will need additional work
 
> When/if those are used, we gain much tighter control on how typography is
> used throughout Plasma, leading to a more consistent appearance of
> "everything text". The usage guidelines for those are missing, and the
> components are also not perfect yet. I suppose the style of those
> components will be changed according to what we make out of this typography
> guideline.

+1
 
> I've attached an example QML file which you can use to test the components
> and play around with it. The code should be pretty self-explanatory, even
> to the QML-untrained. =)
...
> I've committed this as a new page to the widgetgallery in kdeexamples.

cool; i've update it to reflect the various 

> exactly modern. I think the Oxygen font is mature enough, and we should
> change our default from Sans to Oxygen (with proper fallbacks). So more
> control over fonts on our side, distros that want to change it can still do
> so.

+1

> In Plasma active we're using Droid Sans as default so far. It's a nice font
> but should also be changed to Oxygen.

yep.

> Moreover, the Typography guideline should be applied to all of Plasma, not
> just Plasma Active.

i think that's sort of implied :) Andrew's interest stemmed from Plasma 
Active, but we in the Plasma world know that the lines are all blurred.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
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