I set out to do a quick and dirty typography overhaul to make things
more consistent and a bit cleaner, but I kept running into things I
didn't like, so this lead me down something of a rabbit hole of design
tweaks to the OSM site.
Goals here are to have better content hierarchy, better vertical
rhythm, more consistent UI, cleaner markup with less tables, all while
keeping the basics pretty much intact. There are a lot of things I
didn't touch even though they need to be updated (lots of tables where
stuff shouldn't be tables, mostly).
Basic overview of changes:
I added a new persistent header that helps segment pages. It's now
a lot easier to know what you're looking at. The header has a page
title, a description, plus a submenu of actions.
There is now a pattern of 20px/10px margins and padding for more
rhythm and breathing room throughout the site.
I know there are other problems here or things I've missed - would
love another set of eyes to look over this! I am still getting comfortable
working on the site - it's my first time ever digging into a ruby or rails
so I'm not familiar with the templating language yet.
In order to avoid forcing the user to press a confirm button, whilst
still not running into the problems we used to have with virus scanners
activating accounts we use javascript to hide and then automatically
submit the confirmation form.
