Background and text layout for Chrome extension
a widget and apps (uncoded) project by presnick

Creative brief

Business Name

University of Michigan School of Information

What do you do?

Create web apps and browser extensions as part of research projects.

Do you have a desired widget or app screen size?

357 pixels wide by whatever the user's screen height is. This is for a Chrome browser extension popup.

How many pages do you need designed?

1

What is your industry?

Education & Universities

Describe the target audience for your widget or app

People who read news on the Internet

What are 3 things would you like to communicate to your audience through your widget or app design?

1) These are suggestions for other news articles related to the current article
2) Each cluster of suggestions covers a different aspect of the news topic.
3) Shaded (or otherwise highlighted) clusters are ones that the user has already read an article from
4) You can drag articles between clusters or make new clusters if you think of a better grouping

What widget or app design styles do you like?

Simple; we probably just want better choice of fonts and spacing. Perhaps better separators between clusters. And some kind of affordances to suggest that you can move articles around.

We need a neutral design that will not clash with news web pages from various sites that this popup will appear on top of.

What colors do you want to see in your widget or app design?

Probably black and white, though open to other possibilities.

What colors do you NOT want to see in your widget or app design?

Nothing garish.

What adjectives should best describe your widget or app design?

Simple, information focused.

What content must be included in the widget or app design?

The titles of the suggested articles and the tweet counts for those articles.

Could use icons instead of names for the publications they are from.

Some kind of visual separation between clusters is needed.

Do you have additional requirements or links you'd like to share?

We need a design that is easy to translate into HTML and CSS. Since this is all about text and layout, the ideal thing would be to provide CSS that we can use directly, but if it's better for you to work with PSD, we can use that and get someone else to translate it into CSS afterward. Please use a font that's built-in to Google chrome.

We are attaching three documents.
1) The chrome extension, as a .zip file, that you can install
2) Instructions for installing it, and how to edit the .css file to alter the display
3) An image of how the extension currently looks on a sample page.

The instructions document suggests directly editing the .css. But if you work in Photoshop or another tool, you can feel free to just grab sample text from the browser extension and work with it.