In July, we started a three month collaboration with Dave
Crossland working on the Open Font Library website. The main goals were
the website redesign and information re-structuring for version 0.4 of
OFLB.
From the start we’ve been documenting the process on our blog, sharing
our daily doubts and achievements.
We started with sketches and mockups for some of the ideias we wanted to develop. The CSS styled font specimen, our very first post, is an example of one of these ideas. As we tested some approaches and received feedback, we settled on the visual direction for the project. Dave made the suggestion to log our progress in our blog, and so we did — here's the full list of posts:
- Showing the fonts in action
- Sketches and blueprints
- Clearing up the main menu
- First layouts
- Bringing the layout to life
- Finding colour
- Logo issues
- The homepage
- Iterating and re-iterating
- Catalogue views
- Fleshing out the homepage
- Installing your local version of Open Font Library on Fedora 15
- Translation
- Identity guidelines
- Catalogue views II
- The font page
- Media Wiki and version control
- The footer
- Icon fitting
- Refining the homepage
- Interface widgets
- Media Queries
- Rethinking the guidebook
- A filter bar for the catalogue
- Sitting down to type
- The font page II
- Moving up
- Writing and frameworking
Looking back to all of these, we can see the progression from early experiments towards more solid and final ones.
Besides the redesign, we worked on the interfaces for font browsing and previewing, as well as the font family page. These went through a lot of rethinking and refining in the mockups. Once we moved to the Aiki implementation, we had to adapt our structure to the existing framework, along with many tweaks to our original plans, in order to end up with a good version of our design idea thanks to the help and support of Fabricatorz, who added a group of new features to the existing OFLB framework.
We're close to the website launch, and we have to thank Dave Crossland, Robert Martinez, the Fabricatorz and all others who provided valuable insights, suggestions and corrections regarding our designs along the way.