(WIP) Visual styling changes to basic LMS navigation, still under early review

[marcotuts]

This was the outcome of a quick bit of visual style tinkering, and it will require a great deal more of review, testing, and discussion before it can be considered as a platform PR.

The following .gif shows the visual changes proposed.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/uploads.hipchat.com/26537/183095/pBx50njoZgW2qRV/concept-styling.gif

non-gif screenshot:

In short, the idea is to visually reduce weight and grey noise in the main LMS navigational experience, along with eliminating grays and gradients where they aren't adding navigational clarity.

I've left all of the tinkering commits intact, allowing anybody to play around or comment on any of the various approaches tried along the way.

[marcotuts]

@caesar2164 - hi! I wanted to tag you on this branch to involve you early in looking at some visual styling improvements to the basic LMS navigation, since some of the styled areas would need to be tested to ensure it continues to work with the theming layer Stanford (and others) depend on.

There is no timeline for when this work would merge, as a great deal of testing (and visual polish) is still necessary. Please also don't feel rushed to take a look through this necessarily!

Thanks,
Marco

[caesar2164]

@marcotuts - thanks!

I'll definitely keep an eye on this!
(I can't deal with it right now as we have a hackathon!)

[singingwolfboy]

@marcotuts what's the status of this pull request? Looks like it has conflicts, and needs to be rebased.

[marcotuts]

@frrrances, @talbs - I'll be cleaning this up a bit this upcoming weekend for us to look at and brainstorm short term suggestions in the following week. Wanted to suggest a next step given @singingwolfboy's question about the status of this.

@shnayder - If you don't believe any of these (or related) visual changes would make it into the next month or so I can close this PR.

[marcotuts]

@caesar2164 - This is once again not linked to any specific timeline, but still do want to make sure this kind of work incorporates your understanding of the currently-live theming work.

[marcotuts]

This is something that has been planned for in the next couple of months, and would benefit from more visual design and general experience discovery than this quick pull request. I'm closing this for now, though I will keep the branch alive as a potential reference point for this future project.

[jinpa]

We get a lot of requests for words (e.g. "prev" "next") to accompany the arrows at the bottom of this screen. If you're still working on this, it'd be great if you could consider adding those words or similar ones. Many students never make it beyond the first unit in the subsection, because they simply don't realize that they're supposed to click the triangle below to move on. Some faculty deal with this issue by including an explanatory HTML component on every unit, but that doesn't seem great.

[marcotuts]

@jinpa - I've closed the pull request for now, but I think the suggestion to include that text is a good one and should be included whenever we get back to this. Perhaps over this long weekend I will take a look at this branch again and present a cleaner pull request than the first time around.