Design/Archive/Wikimedia Foundation Design

This page served as a style and design specification guideline for Wikimedia Foundation projects around 2013-2014. It aimed to provide designers a rulebook for color usage, design patterns, and general styles.
At the time the design was named "Agora".

In addition, the goals of the Agora project included:

Develop MediaWiki UI, an easy-to-use UI and behavior toolkit (like Bootstrap, but for MediaWiki).
Develop Wikifont, a specialized and unique icon set delivered as a font.

This work continues in the MediaWiki theme of the OOUI advanced toolkit project and the general Wikicons icon set.

This document is by no means exhaustive.

Documentation

Design Principles
Design Process
Agora/Mediawiki.ui library elements and their behavior , see also earlier Patterns and components
Style
- Size and layout
- Color usage
- Typography
- Iconography
- Whitespace (spacing and indentation)
- Writing style
Suggested redesigns
How to give design feedback
Project status and roadmap a @ Foundation User Experience Trello board

Core engineering work

See /status for status updates, also see UX standardization

See MediaWiki.ui Trello board for status of individual controls.

Agora / Mediawiki.ui styles

Explore the Agora styles in the MediaWiki desktop living style guide.

mediawiki.ui input fields, checkbox, and button in a vertical form

Adds skin-agnostic CSS styles to MediaWiki,

The CSS defines various mw-ui-* classes including

mw-ui-button with many variations, such as 'mw-ui-button mw-ui-constructive mw-ui-big' for a large green button for the completed action of a form such as "Submit", and 'mw-ui-button mw-ui-destructive mw-ui-quiet' for a less obvious button that appears red on hover and click for a destructive action such as "Cancel".
mw-ui-vform for a container with a vertical "stacked" layout
- divs, labels and input fields in this are styled consistently
checkboxes and radio buttons within labels with class mw-ui-checkbox-label align better
several utility classes such as mw-ui-flush-left

The CSS is available in core MediaWiki beginning with release 1.22 in the mediawiki.ui module; in 1.23 the button styles are separated into a mediawiki.ui.button CSS module.

You can use context->getOutput()->addModuleStyles( 'mediawiki.ui' ) to ensure the CSS is loaded. If you only need the buttons, add only the mediawiki.ui.button module. (AddModuleStyles because you want the CSS loaded even if JavaScript isn't running.) There may be a JavaScript Agora module, load that separately.

The CSS styles are written in the LESS stylesheet language and the ResourceLoader generates minified CSS from them on-the-fly.

Now we need UX standardization

Typography refresh

The Typography refresh updates the Vector skin to to use a san-serif for most text, and serif fonts for headings.

People

This document is a product of the Design team at the Wikimedia Foundation