[Design] [Cosmo] Magic URL visual design review

[Jeremy Epstein]

Mimi Yin wrote:
> I have added a more 'internationalization-friendly' mock-up for the 
> Subscribe banner area on the 'Preview Share' screen:
>
> http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Journal/StrawpersonProposalForMinimumPreviewCosmoUIElements#AlternateSubscribe 
>
Implemenationwise, I'm not sure its any easier to 
internaitonalize/localize than the first one.

  If you hope to "build the teaser on the fly" then --
to be easy to localize, you need to do the following:

1)  not have a tight typographic layout.  for example, "or susbscribe 
with" might be one long word in german or a five word phrase in french.  
A link or single icon without text is easy to build on the fly, but hard 
to make visually striking.

2) be one big image. Pulling the right image path uses the same 
technique as localization (paths are strings arter all)  and it puts the 
burden of localization outside of engineering. This means art production 
and translation per language, but you have to do it anyway and 
localizing involves writers and artists, not engineers.

 From what I see I believe you want to have sign up and subscribe act as 
a "banner advertisement" (non-profits make ads too. Just ask the sierra 
club) for cosmo/chandler. You want to emphasize things in a more 
emotional way than a link. It won't make engineering sense to many 
engineers, buts its a good compromise.

Mimi, Stick with you guns and go with the most visually appealing 
proposal. At least that's my vote (if I may even do so)


Jeremy

P.S.
Not to be facetious but the engineering work to enable 
multilingual/multicultural applications is Internationalization. The 
artistic and literary effort to support a particular language or culture 
is localization.