A few design revisions will be made centrally to the WSU Web template to improve their coordination with the new WSU home page. You can view a prototype of the revised design at http://identity.wsu.edu/web/gen2update/CampusPreviewTweaks/ and leave your comments below. These template revisions will all be done centrally and no revisions will be required by individual Web developers. The prototype page is for demonstration purposes only. The code is not in its final state.
Look for the template revisions to go live later next week.
Likes:
I very much like how the gradient has been moved from the top to the baseline. This helps define the page, yet retaining a nice subtle baseline gradient, very smooth transition for longer content pages. To my eye this ties in the bottom of the page more and creates a much more defined page region. The top has enough going on already, and this adds a nice, rounded off and grounded finish to the end of the content on the page, making the page contents feel much more complete/finalized.
Dislikes:
I feel that the Site ID, WSU branding and top drop shadows are TOO subtle, they feel bland and lack dynamics.
Doing a back/forth comparison to the new home page, I feel that all of the clarity and openness we gained with the home page top area is lost by flattening this section out on these template pages.
The current overlapping site ID/global nav and rounded branding corner are more effective than this in that the dynamic of the overlap draws attention to these elements, and in my opinion they actually fit better with the front page aesthetic than the new template.
Overall:
I think this is a step in the right direction, but I feel it lacks continuity with the new front page design (Which i think is fantastic, by the way – well done!) and the top of the page feels dead and doesn’t draw my attention down the page – I feel I get stuck before I even begin reading!
Other thoughts:
Perhaps adding white space between the crimson global nav and the page content could resolve this flatness issue. There wouldn’t need to be nearly as much space as on the WSU front page, but this would tie in the aesthetic more with how the new front page is laid out. I also vote for keeping a rounded corner in the upper left branding, helps create more of a flowing feeling going down the page. Because the gradient was moved, something needs to fill this function.
Thanks for reading!
I thought I would leave a few comments (from a student’s prospective — i’m not a university web designer) regarding this update. I really like the home page’s new design, and I also like the overall direction the web design is going (very nice!). For this revision, my only comment would be that I agree with the above; the rounded corner on the top left is a great execution of the brand identity, and giving the page the appearance that it is “sitting on top of” the background with the light drop shadow around the top edges looks very clean.
This new design gives the appearance that something is cut off on my browser, or that the crimson bar is covering something up, like frozen cells on Excel (thats the best example I could think of). I almost expect it to have some functionality like I could click it and the whole page (which now looks like a tab) would roll up into it… Although, I do see the problem that is now created by the more thin crimson bar on the home page — trying to tie that in with the radius edge would look off if everything was kept the same and the bar height just changed it wouldn’t overlap enough to appear like it does now.
I also agree with the above about the drop shadow changes making the top too flat; this goes along with the “sitting on top of the background” look that the current version has. For example, just comparing back and forth this page and the new version, all of the depth is lost on the newest version. Rather than each page being it’s own page on top of the background, it looks as if every page will now just be part of it.
Final thoughts:
- If it was up to me, I would keep the current version of the header, but with the gradient change (same as above post, it looks much better) and other small changes you made. I don’t know if this is a potential solution that you have considered, but I think you could try a compromise by extending the home page crimson bar’s height by a few pixels, and reducing the sub page crimson bar’s height so that they match and there is no change between pages. (You could probably take it up to where the top of the W is on the site identifier of the sub pages). This would allow the current header to still work.
- It looks like the color bar on your revision is about 1px taller than on the home page, there is a small noticeable change when you flip back and forth.
Thanks for doing an amazing job with our website, and I hope my feedback was valuable if it matters!