New design of Blog.co.yu

[force_m]

Take a look at new blog.co.yu design. We use LifeType platform for almost a year, and it's great. We have over 200000 unike visits per mont, and for now LT performance is realy good. Thank you!

Link is http://www.blog.co.yu

[phunkphorce]

That looks like a very nice design, congratulations.

I also very much like the design of your login page (http://www.blog.co.yu/admin.php), specially the shadows around the login window and the gradient inside the box... Do you have a test user that we could use to log into your admin interface so that we can see more? We're improving the admin interface for Lifetype 2.0 and it would be good to see more ideas for "inspiration", if you know what I mean

[force_m]

I created test user. Username is test and pass is test1234.

Take a look to the tempate editor too (UreÄ‘ivaÄ

[jondaley]

It does look pretty neat.

Could you install an English locale temporarily to make it easier for someone like me to check out? I don't need you to add any of your custom strings, but just add the default.

Secondly, you should probably change your links to the control center on the dashboard page to include the blogSelect operation, otherwise the links don't work on the front page, and you have to click on the "new post" link first.

[phunkphorce]

I like the design very much but I see at least a couple of issues with it:

- It's too blue for my taste (but that's easy to change)
- The size of the main table is fixed, but it should be flexible like it is in LT 1.2.

In any case, would you be willing to help us creating a similar look for LT 2.0? I think it would be nice to have some nice looking 3d shadows, rounded tabs and that sort of thing... What do you say?

[thestroller]

Your layout is very cool!!!!!! Congratulations!

[force_m]

I am very busy with my job and faculty right now, but if there isn't some strict deadlines I would like to help.
LT is great platform, but I think that it need some eye-candy design. People like that. I have a lot of ideas, but not much free time to realize them

When will be 2.0 ready for relese, and how much time is available for this redesign?

While doing redesign of blog.co.yu, I changed a lot of admin temlate files to achive this design. In redesign of LT admin, is that OK, or CSS is the only thing tha can be changed?

[jondaley]

I'd say whatever - though we did recently go through some work to make stuff not table/fixed sizes, so we probably don't want to revert that work.

[phunkphorce]

I don't exactly mean to "redesign" the whole interface... I like its simplicity but I agree that it could use some eye candy.

The most strict guideline that we've got is that we should not use fixed sizes, everything should be flexible and users should be able to resize the window to get more space if needed.

Things that I like from your design:

- The drop shadow around the main block of content in the centre of the page. Your main block is currently of fixed size (995 px) and we should have it flexible, but I think that's easy.
- The rounded tabs.
- The gradients in most of the elements, including forms, the button areas and the buttons themselves. Although they are a bit too blue for my taste, that's easy to change
- You're using a bigger font size, and it doesn't look too bad.

There's a few more things, but that's what I can see now quickly.

It would be good if you could help us, specially because we are not very good at graphical design (as you probably noticed) But instead of seeing this as a huge redesign work, we can break it down into smaller bits. For example one day we implement rounded tabs, the next time we implement the drop shadow, next time we implement gradients and hovers for buttons and input fields, and so on.

The current estimated release date for LT 2.0 is 2008, by the way, but it would be good to know if and when you could help us. If you can't, that's ok, but would it be ok if we "borrowed" some of your CSS code and images?

[force_m]

I will help in development of nicer interface. I can start to work on this in mid October. I think there is plenty of time until 2008 and it is OK to break work in smaller bits.
What do you think about replacing icons with nicer ones. And little bigger (on instance 22x22px instead of 16x16)?

[phunkphorce]

Sounds good, we will get back to you in October and see how feasible it is for you to help us then.

Regarding the icons, we have switched to the Silk icon set in LT 2.0 but it is still using 16x16 icons. We are not good at all at designing icons so so far we have been using ready made icons, but if you have a good set of icons of size 22x22 and that contains all the kinds of icons that we need, we could think about it.

[force_m]

I used Silk icons for some projects, but for LT admin I think that bigger icons (in combination with little bigger font size) will look much better. My choise would be Tango Icon Gallery. I think that it has all needed icons.
If I find some available time sooner than I expected, I'll let you know.

[phunkphorce]

The icon set looks good, I didn't know about it. Let's get back to this when we start working on the UI changes later on..