First, congratulations to everyone for getting the W34 templates up and running. Being a WeatherDisplay user, I’m particularly happy to see this version available. I’ve been running WeatherOLA using the Saratoga templates since 2011 and have often struggled with offering a version focused on delivering weather information to mobile devices. The W34 templates fill that role and now that the July version is mostly responsive, weather information is displayed formated and closer to optimal for various mobile devices.
After following the threads for both the April and July versions, I see that there’s been some discussion about the visual design about W34 as used by WeatherDisplay and other weather station software. Since I have both the April and July versions up and running, I have a few comments and a question. Let me start first by confessing that I’m a career graphic designer with decades of experience and well practiced skillset in online/user experince (UX) design. With said, I have a few comments from a visual professional’s point of view. Please understand, that good design is not about various opinions, it’s using a skill set. There are reasons why good design works. I’m just trying to help.
There are number of problems with the April verion, but since the July version is upon us, I’ll focus on that. Skipping past important scale-to-use issues of panel contents and focusing on the larger overall changes from April to July versions, some of the biggest changes are the thin outlined borders added to panel and much of the content contained. From a good design stand point, the added borders are a big problem. Unlike a slight contrast change between panel headers and panel boxes which would have been a major improvement, the outlines add a huge visual distraction and make the July version a big step backwards from the April version. The result in the July version is far less readable on computer screens, tablets are particulary phones and creates some major user interface problems with data points now boxed.
Once, I loaded the July version and many of its improvements and noticed all the jarring visual changes, I hoped that I might be able to change everything back to the April version by subsituting the early CSS files. I had hoped that I’d use that starting point to make a number of other user interface improvements to improve scaling issues. Unfortunaley, swapping out the CSS does not work.
I noticed an earlier discussion about changing from the highlighted circles to the highlighted squares in the different versions (there are much better ways to make important information more readable on both large screens and small screens) but this problem with the outlined box shapes is more immediate. The W34 design is atrtactive and could be much improved by applying other good design methods, but the thin outlines of the boxes and data are a mistake. Since I can’t seem to find the settngs to comment out or make changes in the CSS, where can a graphic designer go to make serious changes to the W34 templates?
Again, thanks for all your work on this project. Very much appreciated. It’ great to have a simple soltuon for mobile uses.