As noted a couple of weeks ago, I recently set up a working mirror of the SCA’s Ordinary & Armorial that incorporates the look and feel of the College’s main website, and tonight I wondered whether the same idea could be extended to the College’s commentary tool, OSCAR.
(I have no mandate to redesign OSCAR, and little sense either of the effort involved or whether such a venture would appeal to the system’s primary developer or the community that uses it, so this should be understood to be purely a matter of idle speculation.)
The resulting mockup includes just six pages: the home page, the list of active letters and that of kingdom letters, the tracking grid, a sample search result, and one sample letter (with commentary expunged).
Most of the changes are limited to the page header and footer: I’ve removed the sidebar, and limited the page to a single block of navigation at the top rather than repeating it at the bottom.
The search form that previously appeared in the sidebar is now tucked away but can be revealed by clicking the search button in the top-right corner of the page.
The letters and kingdom letters pages have been reformatted to reduce repetition; comparing the mockup LoI page to the original reveals that I’m only showing dates once on each row, using month names rather than ISO dates, and omitting seconds from timestamps.
Obviously this mockup ignores many challenges that would be involved in carrying such a design change throughout the site, which has grown to include hundreds of features, so I don’t at all mean to suggest that this kind of visual overhaul would be straightforward, but I thought it was an interesting exercise and perhaps a starting point for future conversations.
