Have you considered removing the tagline altogether? Or write it in plain text not image?

@ZMcCune following up on our chat in the kitchen - knowing how to fix this might require some help talking through brand guidelines and working out if the web team is the best owners of this work. The current brand guidelines of taglines in Italics in standard font do not seem compatible with Cyrillic text for example. Who would be the best person in your team to talk about this?

Is there anything we can actually do here? Perhaps as part of our housekeeping sprint we could reach a final decision on this?

In T308286#9522573, @Jdlrobson wrote:

The current brand guidelines of taglines in Italics in standard font do not seem compatible with Cyrillic text for example. Who would be the best person in your team to talk about this?

FWIW I feel like Cyrillic is the only script that actually uses italic for taglines. Apart from Russian:

• https://be.wikipedia.org/wiki/Дэналі (particularly unreadable example)
• https://be-tarask.wikipedia.org/wiki/Аляска_(штат)
• https://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/Денали (in lowercase for some reason?)
• https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/Деналі
• https://sr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Денали

I assume it was done because tagline in many languages does not fit one line if you write it in normal font style.

Per the web team's quarterly grooming, these tasks are being removed from the team's backlog.

The wordmark and tagline actually look noticeably different today than when this task was started. Here's a table for pixel-by-pixel comparison (click the bottom row to enlarge, use arrow keys to switch):

	Adapted from old PNG logo	Original screenshot, Chrome, 2022	Chrome, today	Firefox, today
Normal size
x8 size

The files were changed in https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/operations/mediawiki-config/+/849175 and again in https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/operations/mediawiki-config/+/935824.

Subjectively, the tagline looks better than in 2022 now, while the wordmark looks worse. It seems to me that the tagline was shifted by a fraction of a pixel vertically in the 2022 version, making it blurry; and today the wordmark is similarly shifted, making it blurry. This should be easily fixable in the SVG file, by adjusting the positions and sizes so that the image elements fit the pixel grid.

In T308286#10603748, @matmarex wrote:

The wordmark and tagline actually look noticeably different today than when this task was started. Here's a table for pixel-by-pixel comparison (click the bottom row to enlarge, use arrow keys to switch):

	Adapted from old PNG logo	Original screenshot, Chrome, 2022	Chrome, today	Firefox, today
Normal size
x8 size

The files were changed in https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/operations/mediawiki-config/+/849175 and again in https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/operations/mediawiki-config/+/935824.

Subjectively, the tagline looks better than in 2022 now, while the wordmark looks worse. It seems to me that the tagline was shifted by a fraction of a pixel vertically in the 2022 version, making it blurry; and today the wordmark is similarly shifted, making it blurry. This should be easily fixable in the SVG file, by adjusting the positions and sizes so that the image elements fit the pixel grid.

Thanks for providing the screenshots and analysis! I think we should do this, plus remove the unnecessary italics, which will make the tagline more readable. Although this will not solve the accessibility problem in any case, since the tagline at 10 pixels fontsize, violates all recommendations.

I have a few options for folks to consider.

I think the reason this has been such an issue is that the taglines are just so small, and the italic forms of Cyrillic lettering in Linux Libertine have a lot of long, curvy, diagonal descenders. Obviously it's harder to render diagonal, curvilinear strokes with square pixels, so they look pixellated when they're that small.

The reason the font needs to be so small is that the words "Свободная энциклопедия" are relatively long, and the em-width of those characters is relatively wide in Linux Libertine, which means that the letters have to be very small in order to fit within the 120px max width of the tagline.

I have 3 options that I think could improve rendering:

Option 1
Just get rid of the italics but use the same font size. This probably won't "fix" the problem entirely, but it'll be an improvement. It looks like this (red is the current styling, black is the proposed):

Option 2
Option 2 is to use the display variant of Linux Libertine, which has a slightly narrower em-width, which means that I can increase the font size by 1px if I reduce the letter spacing by 4%.

Option 3
This is my preferred option. We could use a variant of Linux Libertine called Linux Biolinum, which has slightly bolder descenders and diagonal strokes, as well as fewer serif characteristics like the slab serifs in Libertine.

Option 2 vs. 3

@Jdrewniak is going to spin up an instance that uses the first three options so folks can have a look at them in context.

@Iniquity, @stjn, what do you think about these options?

Change #1131448 had a related patch set uploaded (by Jdrewniak; author: Jdrewniak):

[mediawiki/core@master] [WIP][DNM] ruwiki tagline options

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1131448

Test wiki created on Patch demo by JDrewniak (WMF) using patch(es) linked to this task:
http://patchdemo.wmcloud.org/wikis/ec8a547bb2/w/

just FYI I have those three design options on patchdemo under the following URLs:

1. Option 1 - removing italic - http://patchdemo.wmcloud.org/wikis/ec8a547bb2/wiki/A?ruwikitagline=1
2. Option 2 - Linux Libertine Display - http://patchdemo.wmcloud.org/wikis/ec8a547bb2/wiki/A?ruwikitagline=2
3. Option 3 - Linux Biolinum - http://patchdemo.wmcloud.org/wikis/ec8a547bb2/wiki/A?ruwikitagline=3

Thanks for providing the link. Current logo for comparison: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Заглавная_страница?useskin=vector-2022
On my device, the 3rd option looks the most legible. However, all three options don’t seem to be displaying as well as either the current Russian logo or English logo does because they have a wide gap between the wordmark and the tagline and the wordmark seems squished in comparison to the pre-Vector 2022 logo:

On this resolution, the difference between the 1st and the 3rd option is not that legible, so either one would be an improvement.

Thank you very much for the mockups! I agree with stjn that the test samples have the wrong indentation and are compressed in height compared to the original.

In T308286#10679433, @JScherer-WMF wrote:

I have 3 options that I think could improve rendering:

On this renders I like 1st one and 3rd one too.

Just a question, how correct would it be to increase the slogan font to the minimum readable size and place it on two lines or allow it to protrude to the right of the logo?

In T308286#10702207, @Iniquity wrote:

Thank you very much for the mockups! I agree with stjn that the test samples have the wrong indentation and are compressed in height compared to the original.

In T308286#10679433, @JScherer-WMF wrote:

I have 3 options that I think could improve rendering:

On this renders I like 1st one and 3rd one too.

Just a question, how correct would it be to increase the slogan font to the minimum readable size and place it on two lines or allow it to protrude to the right of the logo?

Good question!
Unfortunately the sizes for those elements are very rigid as far as I know (@Jdlrobson-WMF correct me if I'm wrong here).

Wordmark: 120px max-width, 32px max-height
Tagline: 120px max-width, 18px max-height

The versions above are already the max sizes, unfortunately. If we have some flexibility in the sizing of those elements, I'd love to explore using two lines or extending the tagline beyond 120px width.

Unfortunately the sizes for those elements are very rigid as far as I know (@Jdlrobson-WMF correct me if I'm wrong here).

For logo:
The logos are shared on mobile and desktop so mobile is the constraint here. For the wordmark, anything over 155px will overlap with the search input (and anything close to that will be visually odd on mobile). I'd say 142x33 is probably the upper bound here.

For tagline:
Since this only displays on desktop, in theory you can choose any width or height, but the choice will disrupt the size of the search bar, or the whitespace around the header (e.g. push the content down)

I don't think (plural) you’ve necessarily understood my comment. The problem isn’t that the height of the logo should be bigger, the problem is that in the new version, the dimensions of the wordmark are 135×20, while in the current one, they are 120×20. So in all three mockups the dimensions look wrong in the new version. It might’ve been a bug with configuration? If I manually switch the wordmark to the previous width, it looks better (though there is still too much space between the wordmark and the tagline).

Tagline space issue is a separate one and seems to be from the fact that the current version of the tagline is 120×11, while the new version of the tagline is 135×15, but the top margin for the tagline is hard-coded to be 5px no matter what height it is.

What’s needed here to make it work is not to make them any bigger or smaller, but to:

1. adjust the wordmark size to reflect the actual width of the image (on the backend on Patch Demo, it is still 120×20, but then Vector 2022 renders it as 135×20 for some reason)
2. adjust the space between the tagline and the wordmark based on the new height (hard-coded 5px makes the space bigger when the tagline is higher than usual)

Test wiki created on Patch demo by Jdlrobson using patch(es) linked to this task:
https://patchdemo.wmcloud.org/wikis/7a236e565b/w/

Test wiki on Patch demo by Jdlrobson using patch(es) linked to this task was deleted:

https://patchdemo.wmcloud.org/wikis/7a236e565b/w/

I don't think (plural) you’ve necessarily understood my comment. The problem isn’t that the height of the logo should be bigger, the problem is that in the new version, the dimensions of the wordmark are 135×20,

Gotcha. I've updated the patchdemo so both wordmark and taglines have correct dimensions. Sorry for missing that.
New URL: https://patchdemo.wmcloud.org/wikis/e43713c995/wiki/Main_Page?ruwikitagline=3
Let me know what you think.

Test wiki on Patch demo by JDrewniak (WMF) using patch(es) linked to this task was deleted:

https://patchdemo.wmcloud.org/wikis/ec8a547bb2/w/

Test wiki created on Patch demo by JDrewniak (WMF) using patch(es) linked to this task:
https://patchdemo.wmcloud.org/wikis/73ad340de7/w/

Just fyi the last patchdemo I created is basically the same as Jon's above, just with option 3 as the default and ruwiki content https://patchdemo.wmcloud.org/wikis/73ad340de7/w/index.php?title=A

@ovasileva did we reach a decision on whether we want to deploy one of these new SVGs ?

Change #1131448 abandoned by Jdlrobson:

[mediawiki/core@master] [WIP][DNM] ruwiki tagline options

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1131448