Re: website menus: gradient vs. solid

[Andrew Hawryluk]

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 5:41 PM, Graham
Percival<address@hidden> wrote:
> I'm not certain if the question was clear, so let's do this again
> and put it to a vote.
>
> These two images have the same top-level menu item selected.
> Which is easier to see?
>  http://lilypond.org/~graham/solid.png
>  http://lilypond.org/~graham/gradients.png
>    (ok, the background to the lily icon doesn't match the other
>     shades; this can be fixed easily)

See? Gradient.
Read? Solid, at least for the current set of colors.

It may just be that the reverse gradient of the selected item is too
strong - it disrupts the apparent curvature that the rest of the menu
seems to have.

Perhaps reducing the contrast within each gradient and increasing the
contrast between the two gradients will do the trick:
http://www.apple.com/mac/

On another note, I like the green --> brown transition, but the way it
is applied to the sub-menu groups the options in distinct bundles of
color, which may not be the optimum presentation. Alas, I have no
suggestions short of a dozen different colors in the CSS file (not
that it would be hard, just boring to type).

Andrew