elementary-dev-community team mailing list archive

[Cassidy James <c@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hey everyone,

If you've not gotten a chance to check out Android's new design guide,
please do: http://developer.android.com/design

It's *really* slick and does a great job of being both an introduction and
a reference. It has short, to-the-point text and *lots* of really, really
nice imagery. Seriously, go look at it now please. I'll wait.

So, now that you've looked at that, look at our equivalent:
http://elementaryos.org/docs/human-interface-guidelines

Yeah, our navigation is pretty and the text content itself is fine. But *man
* are we lacking in the illustration and imagery department. Specifically,
look at our "UI Toolkit Elements" section:
http://elementaryos.org/docs/human-interface-guidelines/ui-toolkit-elements/.
Now look back at Android's:
http://developer.android.com/design/building-blocks/. See all those pretty
screenshots, illustrations, freaking *miniature embedded UI screencasts*!?

I feel like it'd be a great goal for us to get one effective image under
each heading. So if a page has no subheadings, we should have one image
there. If the page has subheadings, there should be one image with each of
the subheadings. If you have screenshots, please, *please, PLEASE* follow
the style guide for all the proper font/theme settings and the way to
display your images: http://elementaryos.org/docs/style-guide/images. You
can either send them to me (cassidy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx) or upload them
yourself.

Let me know what you guys think about this idea, and what else we can
improve. Android's a platform that's traditionally been ridiculed for being
ugly, inconsistent, and having bad docs. elementary is a platform known for
being pretty, consistent, and having decent docs. If we're lagging this far
behind Android now, we should be worried. ;)

Thanks,
Cassidy James