CUNY Academic Commons

I started a Google Doc with images and links to each campus communications page if there is one.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CGPTB2O7-r73_Q8MsXvgqz8q33hHwKNudFY_PXGh-V8

I got about a third of the way through. I can finish it if someone doesn’t beat me to it.

• We will need to come up with a standard size limit and
• someone will have to resize all logos to fit within those dimensions
• Some colleges have multiple versions. Do we want to offere more than one version for a college if available?
• Some colleges don’t have pages with downloadable logos.
• The Grad Center wants you to ask their permission before you use the logo

Thanks, Boone -- this looks great. thank you! A few questions:

-- does the logo automatically link to the campus website? If not, would we want it to?
-- can you confirm that the placement/positioning of the widget in the sidebar could be adjusted by how the sidebar widgets are arranged? E.g. if someone wanted the logo to be further down in the sidebar, they could just put other widgets above it?
-- are the logos responsive? If not, and if that's not something we can fix now, is it something we should work for a second iteration?
-- am I right that site owners would not be able to control the size of the logo?

thanks in advance for your thoughts.

-- does the logo automatically link to the campus website? If not, would we want it to?

Yes, each logo links to the campus home page. Sorry, I forgot to mention that above.

-- can you confirm that the placement/positioning of the widget in the sidebar could be adjusted by how the sidebar widgets are arranged? E.g. if someone wanted the logo to be further down in the sidebar, they could just put other widgets above it?

Confirmed. It's a regular WordPress widget, so can be manipulated and placed like any other WP widget.

-- are the logos responsive? If not, and if that's not something we can fix now, is it something we should work for a second iteration?

It depends on what you mean by "responsive". I assume it means "mobile-friendly", but this can mean a number of things. In terms of layout, the widget obeys the theme's rules for how sidebars appear. So if a theme has the sidebar appear at the bottom of the page on a narrow screen, then these widgets will do so as well. In that sense, they are "responsive" by virtue of adapting as expected to responsive layouts (ie, layouts that change dynamically based on the width of the viewport). There's another sense of "responsive images" where smaller image assets are served when viewing on a small viewport, through the use of srcset or other techniques. I have not implemented this, because the images are small (300px) and are already fairly optimized, so the items loaded on desktop view are already quite small and mobile-friendly. If you have something else in mind for "responsive", please let me know.

-- am I right that site owners would not be able to control the size of the logo?

Correct. The images are set to fill the entire width of the sidebar, up to a maximum of 350px (the width of each logo). If someone really needs it to be smaller for some reason, custom CSS rules could be applied. I've intentionally tried in most cases to choose logos that are roughly horizontally oriented - ie, they're wider than they are tall - so that the images don't take up too much vertical space in the sidebar. This usually works, but in a small handful of cases - the Graduate Center comes to mind - the logos are necessarily fairly tall. This is the only case where I can see someone realistically wanting to adjust the size of (ie shrink) the logo.

Okay -- thank you, Boone. That all sounds good to me. I would just suggest that we test this on a mobile device using one or two of our more popular themes to see how it renders.

Thanks, Boone -- I've taken a look. Generally, the logos look great and it is cool to have them linked. Two notes:

1. The logos look a bit big to me. The GC one, especially, is enormous, but I wonder if others could comment on the default sizing as well; for me, the size of the logos would dissuade me from using the widget on my course site.

2. The Hunter logo appears twice -- not sure whether that is an issue.

Overall, though -- great progress and thank you for your work!

Thanks, Matt. As noted earlier, the GC doesn't have a non-vertical logo, and I standardized on an image width for all logos, which means that the GC logo ends up very tall. It is probably possible to shrink it and others, though the technique depends on whether they all need shrinking, or whether it's just one or two.

The extra Hunter logo is probably just because I added an extra widget to the test site. It was all done manually.

Okay. FWIW, I think they all need at least a bit of shrinking, though GC logo needs more due to the difference between vertical and horizontal logos. Is there any way to treat it differently than the others?

Yes, there are ways, but it'd be helpful to have some details about the necessary changes before deciding how to do it. Do you want them all shrunk? All by the same amount (aside from the GC)? Since logos will no longer be taking up all available horizontal space in the sidebar, as is currently the case, how should they be aligned - left or center?

I don't have exact dimensions, and of course it is mostly an issue of proportion. For example, in the attached screenshot, which shows my current class blog, I wouldn't want the logo to be bigger than the pink box (and even smaller would be okay). I did think that all of the logos (save maybe the CUNY Law logo) should be smaller, but that the GC logo should be much smaller.

As for horizontal alignment, I think center is probably fine

Thanks. I've made the following changes:

- Default image size is narrower
- Images are centered
- GC logo is narrower than default
- CUNY Law logo is wider than default

Let me know if there are other changes that you need.

That looks great to me, Boone. Thank you!!

Just tested and looks great. Using 2012 theme, the brand might look better if it was left aligned, but that can be done with CSS also.

Thank you for testing, Scott! I don't want to try making per-theme adjustments this late in the game, but let's definitely consider it for future releases.