Ubuntu Wiki

Fridge Needs a New Theme

The Ubuntu News site, aka "the fridge" needs a new look. The site has a lot of untapped potential and a fresh theme could help it achieve that goal. You can help!

Requirements:

Here are the requirements:

Design

• A new visual appearance, harmonious with the ubuntu website but not *just another ubuntu knock off*
  • My suggestions would be to stick with the colours and fonts of the ubuntu site but not feel constrained to using the rounded borders with the top right drop down nav
• Attractive, people will feel the site is credible
• A layout that looks like a news website
• Possibly include a special layout for Ubuntu Weekly News, since it is a regular item and has a different format than the other news stories

Content Types

This is the types of content people will view on the site:

• News stories
• UWN
• Events

Blocks

These side-bar items will be shown on the site, this may change over time

• Popular content
• Syndication/rss
• Events
• Search
• Video podcast

Phase 1: Mockups

Post your mockups here

1. Smartboyathome's Entry

2. http://sd.ubuntu-us.org - I just want to throw out the theme the Ubuntu Drupal team has been creating. This theme has been written very well. Some stylesheets would need to be created for the Fridge and a different banner would need to be created. Perhaps others can build off this theme and create something specifically for the Fridge?

3. Strider's Remake Strider: I am surely for the Smartboyathome's theme. I have edited it - please see in the link. I intend to make a few changed to it later. The search box looks raw.

4. Giant Speck's Entry Giant Speck: I'm not really good at graphic design, but I came up with something. It's probably too large of a change, but I thought I'd share it anyway. I'll be tweaking it a bit over the next day or so, and I might even try to come up with another one before the deadline, if that's okay.

5. Banner - A rough concept for the head area with 2 type choices. -- Thorsten Wilms

6. Fridge Icon is just a quickie I put together. JohnCrawford

7. tripmckay's Fridge Mockup - played a little with all the ideas, mixed them up with mine and here you go. Blue fade background makes the page still feel like 'The Fridge'. As a bonus this differentiates it from the standard Ubuntu pages, too. Maybe the Ubuntu circle should be exchanged with a fridge-logo (possible conflict with the Ubuntu trademark). Tried to stay in sync with some basic Ubuntu pages layout/design (top menu, search bar position, rounded edges), for ease of use and users see, they're still on a Ubuntu page.

8. Sand & Mercury's Entry - I wanted to have a play around with and subtly push the colour palette that currently exists on the fridge site. It's inspired quite a bit by the work Canonical's art team have done with the Jaunty GDM and Usplash themes, where they haven't been afraid to slip in some deep red among the dry browns. Try to ignore the images used; they're just placeholders, I didn't have net access at the time of designing this to grab something more appropriate. :P - Ian McLean

9 Fridge in progress by MadsRH - I spent the evening creating this mockup based on this. At the moment I'm afriad that I won't find the time to finish it before the 2. April, but I'm uploading my work in progress anyway. //MadsRH

Newz's Inspirational Attachments

Here is some inspiration:

Fox News has an interesting "latest news" "most read" etc format. This could be used nicely

The New York Times homepage has way more content this is applicable for the fridge but they have mini-homepages for newspaper sections. Here's the page for baseball which has a pleasing layout that shows one feature item prominently and links to more information on the right.

I like the way NBC's homepage features events on the left side. I also like the way they have a pretty background that isn't distracting but adds a touch of elegance to the site that is otherwise quite busy (it's got a lot of animation).

CNN shows a video block on the top right. Below that is an advert. Imagine instead of an advert the most recent podcast video featured there with other interesting videos listed above it.

Gizmodo's content probably more closely matches the fridge's than any of the other sites and their homepage style would be a nice match for the fridge.

This is a mockup of the layout it's not a design. It lacks the logo area, search box and links to related sites. Presumably these would be along the top. It is made from the pieces of the above sites.

Phase 2: Tweak design and implement as HTML/CSS

Wait until a theme has been chosen

Phase 3: Drupal theme

Wait until we have HTML/CSS