Talk:Typography refresh

Update to Typography refresh
Hi everyone,

This an update regarding the "Typography refresh" Beta feature, which is live on all wikis that have Beta Features available. The following changes will be live soon, if you don't see them already.

The first version of the typography update certainly wasn't perfect, but the UX design team wanted to get it out there and see what people thought about some of the ideas included. Well, we've recevied a ton of feedback on the Talk page.

Changes made based on your feedback
Almost all of the feedback was constructive, and some showed a really keen understanding of the issues with typography on Wikipedia. Thank you to everyone who stopped by and left a message. Based on the feedback we got, we made the following changes:


 * 1) Reverted the size of the personal toolbar menu and lefthand sidebar back its previous size (.8em)
 * 2) Reverted the black/grey links in the sidebar and personal toolbar back to blue
 * 3) Reverted the width of the left-hand back to its previous width, to avoid line breaks in those links
 * 4) Increased the body content size to 1.1em. While we did not originally increase the body content size, we saw that many people brought up this idea, and we think it's a good strategy for improving readability. This also allows us to emphasize the main content more without decreasing the size of toolbar or sidebar links, etc.
 * 5) Increased the size of page titles and their line height
 * 6) Tweaked the whitespace between section/subsection headings and around blockquotes. We hope this version provides better balance.
 * 7) Reprioritized the font family CSS for headings, placing the free and open source variant "DejaVu Serif" first

Additional ideas we're trying out in this release

 * 1) Placing a maximum width on page contents of 715px. It is widely accepted that text columns with a line length which spans the entire width of a (desktop or laptop) screen are not ideal for reading/scanning.,, , The max width will not apply to Special pages (like Prefences) or to actions on an article, like viewing history.
 * 2) Removing the border around thumbs, increasing the whitespace around them, and changing the text styling on thumbcaptions. Vector and Monobook styles are both overly reliant on border styles to demarcate page elements. Numerous borders, especially with right angles, increases cognitive load when scanning a page.
 * 3) Changing disambiguation and row links to have the same type as thumb captions.

Other things we have retained in the beta. For example, serif headings were a source of complaints, but were retained since one of the goals is consistency with the mobile skin for Wikimedia projects.

On behalf of the design team, Steven Walling (WMF) &bull; talk   23:17, 7 January 2014 (UTC)