Last weekend I finished reading "The Non-Designer's Design Book": http://www.amazon.co.uk/Non-Designers-Design-Book-Robin-Will....
So, I decided to test my newly formed designer skills and modify the look of the site here: http://i.imgur.com/k6y0g.png
The central point of the book is that we can tell when something is off with a design, but rarely we know how to fix it. So, yea this is what I thought need fixing on the site:
1. There is conflict between "What" and "Less Boilerplate" Header. Firstly, the fonts are the same size, so they are competing for who gets viewed first. Second, the orange on "What" is a warm color so it will stand our more, hence overpowering the header. So, I shrunk the "What" and increase "Less Boilerplate."
2. Too control the eyeflow from top to bottom, I increase the size of the navigation bar.
3. I increased repetition by changing the color of the header to white,the text to white and the separator in the navigation bar to white.
4.To highlight the "What" more I indent the text under it. And also set the text under it to be the same font size. There is no conflict here, since the header "What" is already highlighted alot.
5. To show what items that are important under "What", I bold the text that is not in the list.
</Not Related>
2) I agree that the navigation and H2s should have a similar visual weight, so the nav. got bigger.
3) I'm not a fan of dropout text for large quantities, so it's staying dark, but I did brighten the background to increase readability.
4) A rule of thumb for me is that you only need one layer of emphasis for a differentiation of text. Both of our solutions are currently breaking that rule, and I happen to like larger text.
Thanks for the feedback and mockup!
That said, +1 for applying what you learned, even if it may still need some tweaking...
Please log issues if I goofed anything :) I haven't fully tested all of the mixins. (Sass color math & functions work a bit differently than Less)
1. color stops on gradients are very useful, especially if you use them to denote button states, for example
2. drop shadows can be inset
A couple of comments:
1. Aside from my dislike of CamelCase on a few classes, it might be simpler to call the .borderRadius helper "round"? .borderRadius(@radius) is not the best naming, IMHO. 2. As mentioned below, click-stops on gradients really make for nice looking gradients. 3. For the button, I suppose you could make it into a helper method where it can take @buttonColor as a parameter. I'm not loving the almost brown color for the active state. What I did was the reverse the gradient for the active state - so light to dark becomes dark to light when clicked on.
Lastly, what I'm finding is that all these gradients, mixins, shadows, etc. do add up, but I supposed if we compress our assets it will in most cases be less than using images. Anyway, nice work.
Tiny nitpick: IMO the call to action styles doesn't belong (seems a bit to specific for a generic boilerplate). Other than that, nice job.
Edit: I also like that this is more lightweight than Bootstrap - which I hadn't seen before.
"#element{.boxRadius(radius);}" and the box below it references ".borderRadius(radius)"; is it both?
