[MoEd] Article Design
Department for Education
Well you’ve noticed what I’ve done right away. Giant. White. Letters. But why?
1) The old banners have random colours, graphics and fonts. The font is tiny and often difficult to read. Keep in mind that eRepublik has all sorts of players and the very young, very old or those with other difficulties are not going to be able to use these well. They are the ones most needing these links though.
2) Some of the graphics work was done as long as 5 years ago now, you can see a list of the different seals for different parts of the government here and some are very well done:
It is impossible to update any of these though. The bits of Government we have now don’t line up with the bits of Government back then. What if your position doesn’t have a design or what if your design looks silly? The last Minister of Education had to use “Ministry of Information and Education” and have an MS Paint tree logo.
3) Half of the links are broken. Most of your probably don’t notice since you don’t need the information, but the new players did. Again we are limiting ourselves to a player years ago needed and having to fit everything we want to do into the old ways. This is holding back our Government.
I did three things to fix this. Use a single easy to find image/style, look for the scientifically best fonts and colours, then spell out exactly how I made it so that others can follow.
1) This work has been done before so I just took the UK Coat of Arms and colours off the real life British Government website. If you are really interested in what they did to work out this problem, take a look at this blog.
2) It turns out that a lot of scientific testing was done to find the perfect font for road signs years ago. The Government tweaked for their new website and called it “Transport New”, you can generate your own words in this font at this website.
3) To fit this into an eRepublik article, you have a 675 pixel width limit. For a banner just paste your words into MS Paint at any size, upload the image to a hosting website and eRepublik will shrink it down. To have a link bar with 5 links, each bit has to be 135 pixels wide as eRepublik will not shrink more than one picture on a line. Put a [url=][/url] around your [img][/img] to make an image link.
Obviously this is more advanced article editing so PM me for a copy of the code for this and some more help.
Comments
Feedback is appreciated on this before I start making more images in this style 🙂
old colourful design matches the old tradition of XVI century splendor, with a touch of victorianism. This black an white design seems taken from a label of a bottle of bleach.
This is why I'm testing it, feedback 🙂
They look very nice. I'd just make them less wide with slightly smaller letters.
Does it fit on the page in your browser?
Yes.
The new design feels a bit plain to me; I found the old colourful images more appealing, but you're right that they can't be updated :/
Yeah it's kinda the point so that everyone can read it 🙂 Could be that it's only suitable for the Education articles if feedback is mixed on how it looks though.
looks great and they are some amazing tips 🙂
Haha, you are the erep Gove!
Yep!
you played slap gove on fb yet? our lass has lol
God yes.
Needs colour, needs a different font, and needs the seals.
because reasons..?
It's absolutely terrible without them. Need I say more?
See Ayame for an example of how detailed feedback with reasons can help a change be made.
Personally gotta agree, White on Black is a bit stark. Maybe even just having a dark gray with each link being a different colour and putting a little shadow on the text too.
Maybe a little UK Flag?
It's easy to read though right? 😛
Well yeah xD But personally if it was black on white I'd have gone the other way, but it's p. damn large 😛 But I can get the reasoning for that.
Jut it feels very, dunno how to say this, reich esque :/
There is one quite way of brining colour to it without changing much actually, which would be just having an image for the banner and the current DoE banner bit placed on the bottom of the image.
Might be worth a shot.
*quick way of bringing
May try dark blue instead of black.
Done!
Actually much nicer 😃
'Half of the links are broken.'
On the MoHA format? Are you sure? The format I'm using has all the links working absolutely fine. Only thing wrong with it is that the old 'Come to the eUK forums!' picture is dead 🙁.
Citizen advice goes to Kravenn moaning.
Library Project goes to Virgin Media "this does not exist" page.
MoHA Newspaper is 3 months out of date since the org was stolen.
Apparently you found something broken with the UK Forum link.
The list goes on...
Yeah I've just seen those two gaping flaws in it.
However, it can be fixed quite easily. I can change the links to something else so if I ever had anything for those links it would actually work.
It's a image which doesn't work, but all the links to the official forums are absolutely fine, at the moment 😒.
It was easy to fix, I fixed it.
Make it's more glorious this is Britain not Uzbekistan!
Well I've taken into account Ayame's feedback and worked hard to make improvements.
Stick some reasons and suggestions into your comment and it may just happen, that's teamwork!
Less Utilitarian, A little more sumptuous. A nicer font? Perhaps not the royal coat of arms and the actual Ministry of Education and Information Seal instead. On that note is says the Department for Education, Has it slipped so silently from Ministerial prospect?
It's part of the MoHA.
looks a bit like I've made them. poor
Trollativity - Like negativity but worse.
you asked for feedback man. I gave the truth
Look at what Ayame wrote for feedback. I acted on it and now it looks much better.
"poor" isn't feedback.
All links worked fine for me.
Think it looks OK, a little bland but functional.
More rainbows