We would like to work with the datagrid but we have an issue with the buttons in all our site.
Once Clarity is installed it is not possible anymore to make small square buttons.
In a kind of way the minimum width of every buttons seems to be overidden by something in your system.
Is there a way to seperate distinct components of the Clarity Design System ? Or maybe exclude some of them ?
Are you aware of this issue with button minimum width ? Do you know a way to prevent this behavior ?
Many thanks.
The styles for Clarity are bundled as a single unit, so you would have to build the styles yourself and only build the pieces needed for the Datagrid. Some details can be found near the bottom of the themes documentation about custom themes https://vmware.github.io/clarity/documentation/v0.11/themes. You'd have to go further by trying to remove everything else. Then you could just import the ClrDatagridModule from #clr/angular into your Angular application.
However, I cannot guarantee that you'll be able to avoid the button issue because the datagrid has buttons and we don't recommend building just isolated pieces of Clarity (we don't know how well it will work in practice).
You can always overwrite any CSS with your own to reset something like the buttons min-width property. We set some values like that to ensure that things are properly accessible for users, so I'm not sure exactly what your limitation is but probably the best thing to do is just override the Clarity styles when necessary.
Thanks for your help.
I managed to neutralize the button behavior by adding the following code to my css file.
.btn {
min-width: unset;
min-height: unset;
}
I have a very huge form panel with multiple fields. The only thing that makes it inconvenient is single background color. I want to use stripeRows functionality like in the grid component, so that even and odd fields will have slightly different background colors. I tried to use css long ago, but the effect was not good, because there were large paddings between field. So, what is the best way to restyle the form?
I found this article that explains how to easily do this:
http://skirtlesden.com/articles/styling-extjs-grid-cells
I find Bootstrap insufficiently flexible. For example there's not a straightforward way to change font or line-height properties. I want a one-line method to change these properties.
What else can I use similar to Bootstrap (that I'm sure will not be as rich)? I just need some style collections that are flexible for those kinds of changes.
You can change all of the typography values (and pretty much everything else) on the Customize Page. The links are in the toolbar at the top of most pages of the Bootstrap site.
Typography is one of the things that I can never get right when I design the web pages in css, the headings and body text never looks and feels as good as most other websites I see on the web. By this I main that my typography does not feel as readable and spacious as on these websites
I do try to copy the css of these nice looking websites, but I never seem to get the same result (or at lest I never seem to make those techniques my own, so that I can use them in the future). Plus, when it comes to typography, my css is all over the place; if I need to change the style later on, I spend a long time searching for the relevant value
When I first started learning css, I found a lot of tutorials on how to get the page layout correct (static, fluid, navigation left/right) but I never found any thing useful on how to get the right look and feel when it came to typography.
on the other hand there are a lot of book on typography but the don't seem to help on how to get typography looking good on the web.
I am hoping you can suggest some resources, or any fixed approaches that would always guaranty that type will look good on the web
Thanks
This article may be useful: http://ilovetypography.com/2008/02/28/a-guide-to-web-typography/
You're already doing the right thing by poking around the sites you admire and trying out their css; it's one of the best ways to learn.
In general, when I'm working with typography, the best things you can do to make it look good is to consider three things: contrast, color, and visual hierarchy.
Contrast: If your text is presented on a background with a color that does not contrast it well, it's going to look bad. So bad, in fact, that it may be deemed 'inaccessible'. You can use a tool such as Colour Contrast Check to make sure your text complies with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
Color: You'll probably find that most of the site you enjoy don't have truly black text. Pure black isn't commonly found in nature, and black text on a white background is the highest contrast you can get, which can look a little harsh. Most sites tone it down by making their black text slightly gray, with css such as color: rgb(30,30,30);
If you want to use colors, try to pick ones that work well together using basic color theory. Either that, or pick a nice dark color and stick with black.
Visual Hierarchy: Basically, use bigger fonts for more important headlines. So an h1 will most likely be your biggest piece of text, with each size going down all the way to h6, and anything else in p tags should be roughly the size of the text you see here. Webdesign Tuts just recently posted an article on visual hierarchy that was pretty good.
Hope that helps!
It seems like there is an increasingly popular trend to style hyperlinks in a color that's barely distinguishable from body text. I noticed this just the other day on an SFGate blog page. Also notice that link just a few words ago. Are my eyes getting worse, or is that hard to spot?
I certainly understand styling hyperlinks to look better than browser default styles. But, if they're not easy to see, what's the point of having them in the first place?
My best guess is that designers (or whomever makes the styling decisions) are wary of interrupting eye tracking with colors or other styling that is significantly different than the body text. That would make some sense, but I feel that there's a lot more room for compromise - i.e., styling links to be different enough from the body text that they're easy to spot, while not making them so flashy that they attract the eye to the detriment of easy reading.
Would anyone make the argument that subtle hyperlinks are more effective than more obvious ones? Or, can you point me to any theories or testing conclusions that may justify their use?
#Mike Daniels: Thanks for clarifying that the color I'm having trouble differentiating on this site is the visited link color - I hadn't noticed that, but you're right. The unvisited link color is rather prominent, and it makes more sense to me that visited links would blend in more with the surrounding text.
On another note, I'm not sure that I buy the argument that a hover color/effect is enough to properly distinguish a hyperlink. I don't feel that it serves the cause of usability that a user should have to hover over a link to confirm that it is in fact clickable. I think that should be made obvious at a glance.
I actually have a very good IPS-panel monitor and near-perfect vision with my glasses on. I can see the visited links on this page and those on the SFGate blog if I scan for them, but my argument is that it would only take an underline, a different color, or another visual distinction to make the links stand out much more.
What I'm really wondering is why - assuming that the designer(s) on a high-traffic site like SFGate know what they're doing and have made conscious decisions about link colors - they would choose to style the links to resemble the body text so closely? Is there reasoning behind that?
I can see the reasoning behind not wanting to have hyperlink styles which strongly clash with the regular text, as they can be distracting while reading. But I think that's rarely a problem. If you look at a site like Wikipedia, the links are very visually distinct from regular text, but it doesn't at all make the text harder to read
So the only real reason to only subtly differentiate inline links from standard text is for aesthetic purposes. I think that's what the SFGate designer has done. The link colors they use are easily differentiable when they are not inline (e.g. the Recent Entries or Categories panes), but they are perhaps harder to pick out in the text.
Since they've already carefully chosen a good color scheme that works aesthetically, and you generally don't want to employ too many different colors in a design or use different-colored links in different places, there's not a lot of options. They could have:
bolded the links
underlined them
used dotted underlines (a nice compromise)
or use rollovers
All of which would help to differentiate links from text without needing to give the links a brighter color.
But you also have to take into account the type of page it is and the usage pattern of visitors. If you have a lot of inline links, or if users are mainly there to read an article, not follow embedded links, then you don't want the links to draw so much attention. The SFGate blog is more akin to a digital newspaper. It's not a standard news blog where links are the primary content, or Wikipedia, where the embedded links are also a major focus of the site. Basically, the few links in the blog posts are only there to provide a little supplementary info for the curious but are expected to be ignored by most readers. And they do stand out enough so that while reading the article, you will see the links as you come across them.
The main navbar is readable , and the sub-navbar is normal text with a while background giving the main navbar visual hierarchy. The page is actually alright.
It depends on what you're trying to accomplish. As a site owner, I might realize (via A/B testing) that a subtler link color increases CTR, reduces bounce rate, etc. .
I do, however, think that differentiating your links only by color might cause some problems for colorblind folks.
ok, in SO the visited hyperlink colour is a bit darker and is harder to distinguish from the unvisited hyperlink colour. But I think inline hyperlink design is a tough question to answer. I mean you want someone to know the hyperlink is there but at the same time, is it more or less important than your content? if its the ultimate destination then maybe making it stand out more (i.e. by underlining it) if its evidence for a point and therefore less important that someone clicks it theres no need. I'd argue a simple colour change would do, maybe make the visited/unvisited links a closer match so that they maintain their visibility in the content.
I didn't realize until Mike Daniels pointed it out that your issue is with visited links, not normally-colored links. Visited links have traditionally blended in more, it's not really a new concept. I think the theory is if you've already visited the link you must know it's there, so there's no reason to draw your attention to it anymore; there are other links you haven't visited yet that you're likely more interested in
I can clearly distinguish the link color from the text color. Maybe you should adjust your display settings? I suppose it could be a bit bolder to distinguish it from the surrounding text, but it's ballpark.
It would be nice if the SFGate blog page page used the hover property to provide another visual cue that the thing that I think is a link is actually a link.
Could be one of 2 scenarios, both of which I have experienced.
the design agency isn't web savvy and thinks that different coloured texts and (worse) underlines are unsightly and has asked the designer to make the links visibly uniform (you'd be surprised how often I get asked to do this).
the text has been SEO'd incorrectly by someone who's about 6 years behind the times and believes that you have to link every instance of a term on a page but with a consideration for the visitor, so they've been styled down.
I'm curious if, similar to something Chesterfield said above, someone is under the delusion that they should link lots of stuff on the page in order to improve their search engine rankings. And, because of that, they thought the page might look less ugly if they toned down the coloring of links so that they're more to game Google than for end users.
I'd be curious to see some stats for the number of links per article for under-emphasized links versus articles where the links are clear. Obviously it wouldn't be 100% scientific, but it might lead to more clarity on the issue.
maybe this could be a nice soloution
a {
font: inherit !imporant;
text-decoration: inherit !imporant;
color: inherit !imporant;
}