How can I help?

[Shaun McCance]

On Fri, 2011-04-08 at 13:10 -0500, Jim Campbell wrote:
> Hi Shaun,
> 
> On Wed, Apr 6, 2011 at 8:34 PM, Shaun McCance <shaunm at gnome.org>
> wrote:
>         Hi all,
>         
>         Ubuntu doc regulars like Phil and Jim were critical in getting
>         the new GNOME help into shape. Now that GNOME 3 is out the
>         door
>         and I have a modicum of free time available, I want to help
>         you
>         all with the Ubuntu help.
>         
>         What can I do to help?
>         
>         --
>         Shaun
>         
> 
> Thanks for offering to help. One thing that would be particularly
> helpful involves the Mallard HTML output. As we discussed at one
> point, the HTML output in Mallard is mostly set up to provide
> something functional, but it would be nice if we could get the HTML
> help to look a bit more Ubuntu-ish. 
> 
> There is an Ubuntu web style guide (PDF) that is extraordinarily
> detailed: http://design.canonical.com/brand/D.%20Ubuntu%20Web%
> 20Guidelines.pdf  I wouldn't expect the help to conform to those
> standards exactly, but it can be helpful with regards to fonts,
> colors, heading sizes, and stuff like that.
> 
> Someone also has an Ubuntu django-theme branch:
> https://code.launchpad.net/~chrisjohnston/ubuntu-website/django-css-guidelines
> 
> Would the CSS stuff be something that you think you could help with?

Do you want this just for web builds? Or do you want to change
the look of things inside Yelp? The rendering in Yelp has a lot
of design constraints, including:

1) Yelp always follows theme colors for accessibility.
2) Yelp rendering scales with font sizes for accessibility.
3) Yelp assumes the window won't be bigger than about 500px.

I notice the style guide has a lot of information about pixel
dimensions and grid layouts. I can override the HTML output
for the web to match those. By the way, the current rendering
is not haphazard. It follows a more-or-less 1.2-multiplicative
scale, with adjustments at the extreme ends of the scale.

As for colors (on the web), if you want any colors other than
the orange-grey-white in that document, somebody else should
probably make me some colors that fit into that scheme. The
tools assume background and border variants of grey, yellow,
blue, and red, as well as a base background color, text color,
and light text color. I'm red-green color-blind. If I try to
make a new palette, you won't like the results.

--
Shaun