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To: Bill Ulrich who wrote (18397)	6/3/2003 10:39:20 PM
From: David Lawrence	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 32968

Is this a close-up of the guys in the SI logo? octanecreative.com

To: Bill Ulrich who wrote (18397)	6/3/2003 10:48:18 PM
From: Rick Faurot	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 32968

I like the khaki version for the fact that it gets rid of the puke yellow on the buttons. The Venture Capitalists show up better on the gray, however.

To: Bill Ulrich who wrote (18397)	6/3/2003 11:25:41 PM
From: wlcnyc	Respond to of 32968

Go khaki! I really like that one. JMO

To: Bill Ulrich who wrote (18397)	6/3/2003 11:36:14 PM
From: Done, gone.	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 32968

khaki...grey...butterscotch Had to Options myself out of Classic to see what you're up to, but that particular ugh aside (g,) at this end Keri and I agree without a word of argument (ah, were life always so easy) -- of the three, the khaki version rules. Gal says hi, hopes you're well!

To: Bill Ulrich who wrote (18397)	6/3/2003 11:37:20 PM
From: Jon Tara	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 32968

The change won't be quite so easy. The "buttons" are actually individual GIFs, two versions each, in pushed and unpushed states. (BTW, I think the yellow on kahki "pushed" state in your sample GIF doesn't work so well. Probably best to pick another color for the selected button text.) The "Silicon Investor" logo is rather interesting. It's anti-aliased against butterscotch, but the actual background is white, presumably with transparency set. That is, the logo really IS blue with a yellow fringe. It will only look good if displayed against a butterscotch background. The butterscotch background isn't part of the GIF, but is supplied as the background color of the table that the logo is embedded in. This introduces a dependency between the GIF and the HTML page source. Change one, and you have to change the other. The artist apparently drew the logo against a butterscotch background, then changed the background from butterscotch to white, then set white as the transparent color. Why? Beats me. This might cause "interesting" results in some browsers. An awful lot of faith is given to the browser to lay the logo against the background properly. I would have made the whole banner a GIF, but not including the butterscotch on blue menu to the right, which is dynamic content, or the buttons. That would knock out both the potential browser-dependent rendering problem, as well as the dependency (get tired of the color of the banner, change only the GIF). Background colors in a GIF are "cheap" (byte-wise), and it wouldn't increase the size of the GIF more than a few bytes if that. At the same time, it would insure consistent rendering of the banner. "Enter name or symbol", "symbol lookup", and the Portfolio, Inbox, etc. menu to the right are text, as is the selected menu's submenu. So, the muddying of these due to anti-aliasing is a browser-specific and user text-size preference-specific issue. It is the BROWSER that is doing the anti-aliasing in this case. (The anti-aliasing in the logo is static, i.e. part of the GIF). The top-level menu items are GIFs, though. Kinda goofy, and falls apart if the user changes the font size. That is, if you increase the text size enough, the sub-menus are much larger than the top-level menu items. The top-level menus could probably be done as text in a table, so that they would scale with the font size as well. This would fit with Bob's idea to pare-down the amount of stuff that has to be sent for each page. You'd lose the "selection" highlighing (notice the vertical lines to the left and right of the selected top-level menu item). You could probably replicate this by turning on the left and right borders of the selected menu item's cell, and making the cell borders the right color.

To: Bill Ulrich who wrote (18397)	6/4/2003 11:09:38 AM
From: SI Bob	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 32968

First, is it just me, or is the site REAL pokey this morning? That Khaki layout is beautiful! However, that needs to be saved as a future development. The big challenge there is the menu buttons. There're 8 GIFs there, each of which would need modifying. Not wanting to dig that deep yet. Would rather save that for when I'm re-doing in ASP and have established a directory structure and decided whether or not to continue doing those as GIFs. They're done as text on iHub. By default, they're displayed much like "Logout / SI Mail" on the right side, but each user can configure them to look like buttons (my personal preference), but since they're text, the only clickable part of the "button" is the text in it. It's been complained about once. Using GIFs solves that "problem", but gives me less flexibility. And GIFs are bigger than text. I'm extremely tight-fisted when it comes to bandwidth, having been stuck with dialup for years until recently. So, have a look at SI3 and let me know if that's a workable stopgap for now. Let me know if there are other suggested changes to it that don't involve the GIF menu buttons and can co-exist with them the way they are. I like the overall look of having the blue background on the right side, but for you non-colorblind folks, does it also make the "SI Guys" harder to see? Which might be a good thing in that they're ornamental and not necessary visually for functionality?