ELMS Style Guide Released!

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btopro's picture

Download your copy today!

After months of hard work and abstraction from original deliverable, the ELMS Design and Style Guide has been released. This is a professionally produced, extremely high quality, responsive minded, and completely open style guide provided under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0. Jay Perry Works was originally contracted to produce a style guide for the e-Learning Institute (ELMS Initiative home) to help influence the design and rebranding of the Institute as a larger part of the College or Arts & Architecture. This style guide was produced to help give consistency and design quality to the Course Information System distribution.

While the style guide is still being implemented in ELMS: CIS as part of the default theme the style guide driving the look and feel of that theme are dictated by Jay Perry Works incredible work. After final approval of the style guide for the e-Learning Institute, we asked Jay to reproduce an Open Source version of the design guide for public use. The theme for CIS would already be released under GPL 2.0 because of Drupal code licensing, so sourcing the style guide only made sense.

Jay produced the open version of the ELMS style guide on his own time because of his appreciation of open source and wanting to see ELMS more widely adopted. Thank you Jay for all your hard work on this, it will serve as a basis for design revisions of all systems, widgets, and themes produced as part of the ELMS Learning Network going forward.

Comments

AMAZING! REALLY, REALLY

kreynen's picture

AMAZING! REALLY, REALLY GREAT STUFF.

I just want to say this again so that what I ask next doesn't diminish from the fact that you've actually created and published this.

REALLY AMAZING! GREAT STUFF.

Now the asks :(

Have you considered publishing this on github? There are a number of benefits to publishing this as pages there instead of a PDF.

  • changes/improvements to the assets can be tracked and shared... including changes to the pages that make up what is now an uneditable PDF. Sharing this w/ a Creative Commons license is (again) GREAT!, but if I can't edit the document having the right to doesn't really help.
  • people aren't forced to download a 200MB zip to get a single raw asset

But now I follow it up with an offer :)

If you are open to this, I'd be willing to donate some time to help with the conversion. I know github isn't a designers first choice of tools, but it isn't just for developers any more.

forked and hosted here --

btopro's picture

forked and hosted here -- https://github.com/btopro/elms-styles/ with the exception of the monster file you referenced which is still in the original package.

Thank you

btopro's picture

Ha, sounds like how I pose big asks in your contrib projects ;).

I completely understand and hosting is actually why Jay had trouble getting it out the door (It's been "final" for a few months and ready for release for a few weeks now). He said he tried to put it on github but there were file size limitations, though I agree the whole "hey download a 200 meg file" is a bit daunting :).

It's also important to note that while it is for ELMS, we will be using this to influence all design on the web at our College (already starting to since we've had the source for awhile). So these design elements really aren't specific to ELMS for the most part. As such, forking for own purposes and reposting / proposing changes either in an ELMS issue queue or on a theoretical github space would be useful.

I wonder if a compromise between ridiculous and useful would be that the primary handout / pdf overview is converted to a document. I'll try playing with getting this onto github and talk to Jay. Thanks for the feedback