Re: WANTED: Design for documentation (Photoshop power users!)

[Robin Bannister]

Hallo.  Me again, this time with a navbar suggestion. 


The first time I saw the navbar it seemed rather indigestible - 
so much text to read.
But I did understand that the square brackets were indicating buttons. 

The second time was after visiting help, where I came to see that, 
for me at any rate, if you paid attention to the arrow heads, 
you didn't have to read all the text each time. 

And then I puzzled about the layout: 
[Up] seemed to be rather like [<<] and [>>], but it wasn't placed on their level. 
I supposed that was because you really needed three levels to 
hint at the destinations, i.e. 
       
       [Top]
       
[<<]    [Up ]    [>>]

[< ]             [ >]

and this had been squashed together to save space:

[<<]    [Top]    [>>]

[< ]    [Up ]    [ >]

So there wasn't very much you could do about it, 
because [Top]'s destination was obviously higher than [Up]'s destination. 


But recently I have come to see that it is not quite like that. 
The group [Top][Contents][Index][?] is a mixed bag: 
- [Index] goes in exactly the opposite direction to [Top] 
- [Contents] and [?] head off into Metaland 
- and [Top] might well have been less vertical e.g. [<<<]. 

So I think this group is pretty neutral as regards destination, and propose: 


L
Swap the [Top] and [Up] groups in the navbar. 


This is accompanied by two adjustments: 

- replace [Up] with [^]
    this extends the signpost motif to a (squashed) compass rose motif, 
    making the arrow heads that much more effective. 

- rename [Top] to the more neutral [Start] 
    (as currently used in the tocpane tooltip text) 

Navbar.png shows an example of the result: 

[<<]     [^]     [>>]

[< ]    [etc]    [ >]


Cheers,
Robin

navbar.png
Description: PNG image