Design

As an international and inclusive project, Open Food Facts needs to share a clear design for all its current and future users.

This current page aims to list main needs and constraints, and document our current design efforts.

TODO: are we speaking about graphic design or should we discuss, at a higher level, about user experience?

How to help

Open Food Facts does need design work and design skills.

Design discussion takes place in the "design" channel of our Slack space.

Some current tasks to be done:

• document current design state (see below)
• identify issues (coherence, accessibility, ...), and report it on Github
• check for our existing issues: see these categories:
  • design
  • a11y
  • editing
  • css
  • responsive ux
  • frontend
• as a first step, better explain our goals

Needs and constraints

Open Food Facts design have to address the following needs and constraints:

• international: Open Food Facts is an international project and its design should be readable and understandable in any kind countries or cultures
• highly readable: Open Food Facts is a project which promotes food transparency and aims to share knowledge; its design should make contents easy to read and understand
• inclusive and accessible: we care about every kind of users with every kind of technologies or disabilities
• opened to every kind of usages and users: Open Food Facts is not only talking to the general public but also to professionals such as scientists, policymakers, expert, journalists, food producers, etc.
• Open Food Facts doesn't provide recommendations but tries to enlighten users about product facts; its design shouldn't add subjective meanings unless it is based on facts and science (e.g. red colour used to share a factual information)

Current design state

Open Food Facts is currently using informal rules to support these needs and constraints.

Fonts

Open Food Facts is using easy to read fonts: for their main contents, most Open Food Facts websites(*) use the following font directives: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Roboto, Arial, sans-serif

• issues:
  • "Helvetica Neue" and Helvetica are not installed on some operating systems such as Linux (and ?); some users have said Helvetica is not the best
  • Roboto is not installed natively on the main operating systems (MacOS, Windows, Linux); it should be downloaded by a CSS directive but it's not
• TODO:
  • compare with other website such as Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap or other projects
  • use Arial which is widely used?
  • use CSS directive to download the main font (drawback: impacts on performance)
  • what about non-Latin alphabets?

(*) tip: Font Finder, a Firefox extension, is an easy-to-use font inspector to get the current font of the selected element.

Open Food Facts logo

[to be documented]

Open Food Facts palette

[to be documented]

Open Food Facts illustration policy

[to be documented]

Resources and inspirations

• What happens when you prioritize consistency over clarity.
• Defining Principles to Drive Design Decisions
• How to maximize the impact of content design (see slide 46)
• Design for Coherence, not Consistency