[x] The look of the family trees

I'm not a fan of the button-style look of the new family trees. The buttons seem to take up a lot of room. They perhaps even make the trees more choresome to read, although that could just be me not being used to them.

American Armada's tree on the old site fitted into 500x460 pixels: [i.imgur.com] https://i.imgur.com/pZ0voPn.png
On the new site it fits into 1000x1580: [i.imgur.com] https://i.imgur.com/4wj7euY.png
If I go into Firefox developer tools and make the buttons disappear, it's 860x810 (notably without reducing the font size or the length of the horizontal lines): [i.imgur.com] https://i.imgur.com/2be8PXC.png

Two reasons to fit more info into the same space are viewing on mobile, and also my old request of wanting to see more in some of the trees: [bandtoband.com] https://bandtoband.com/forums/feature-request/showing-2-or-3-degrees-of-38828 (eg. not reducing a tree of 40-80 bands within 3 degrees down to 30-ish bands within 2 degrees).

Not sure if you have your own thoughts about family tree display on phone screens. However, if you remove the button decor and shorten the horizontal lines, that could get you close to showing 2 degree family trees on mobile without having to reduce the font size much.

I also wonder if it'd be good to sort each set of branches alphabetically. That'd make it easier when reading up and down a tree looking to see whether we have a particular band directly connected to the one in question. I know I find alphabetical lists easier to read in general.

Interesting to see - I've only been looking at the new site on my phone, and all it shows me of the family tree is the name of the band whose page it is in the button style, with no other connections. I'd assumed family trees hadn't been sorted yet!

I like the idea of alphabeticising them for ease of reading, and I'm a fan of fitting as much information on a page as possible without it getting too unwieldy and slow to load.

+1 to Bloopy's suggestions.

Speaking of alphabetization, is there any rhyme or reason to the listing of member names in lineups on band pages? That could just be alphabetized as it is on album pages.

On band pages on the old site, I recall often seeing member names in reverse alphabetical order (Z-A) if a band only had 1 lineup and 5 or less members and I thought that was kind of a neat quirk. I dunno if it was deliberate, but maybe on just that one page the people used to always being listed last can have their day in the sun!

Examples:
[web.archive.org] https://web.archive.org/web/20211127173717/http://bandtoband.com/band/the-stroke...
[web.archive.org] https://web.archive.org/web/20160901172439/http://www.bandtoband.com/band/stress...
[web.archive.org] https://web.archive.org/web/20201202101643/http://www.bandtoband.com/band/dark-l...
[web.archive.org] https://web.archive.org/web/20201027002451/http://www.bandtoband.com/band/md45

Hey guys, I jacked up my back a few weeks ago and have slowly getting back into the swing of things. Sorry for the delay.

Plenty of good suggestions here. I'll start working through them.

To start off, I've sorted the Family Trees alphabetically. Let me know if that's what you're looking for. I'll start working on tree depth / mobile views / etc here shortly.


Kevin

I've squeezed the family trees down on mobile devices so you can:

1) see anything at all
2) see more without padding

There are some additional tricks I will try to tighten up the space additionally. Let me know if this is more in line with what you guys wanted.


Kevin

Looks great on mobile now. The tree could just do with a white background so the grey line of the page's right border doesn't tangle with the grey lines of the tree.

The alphabetical sorting is nice and helpful too.

The grey border has been removed on mobile now. I'll keep chipping away at other improvements.


Kevin

Definitely looks better on mobile without the border, thanks for sorting that.

As someone who pretty much exclusively uses the site on mobile these days I appreciate all these improvements.

I've squeezed the family tree on mobile even more, moving the band name above the connecting branches which gives a bit more room to see everything.

There are still a few more tweaks to be done for the family tree on mobile and I'll keep chipping away at them here.


Kevin

I've truncated the extra long band names in the family trees, a litter tighter on mobile screens as opposed to large screens, so there is less side scrolling. Hopefully these tweaks make the family trees as usable as possible, especially on small devices.


Kevin

I've now sub-sorted the Line-Ups section on band pages alphabetically so bands with a limited number of lines have artist names in order:

[bandtoband.com] https://bandtoband.com/band/the-strokes

Bands with an absurd number of line-ups are still primarily sorted by earliest appearance, number of line-ups, then alphabetically:

[bandtoband.com] https://bandtoband.com/band/hawkwind

Let me know if there are any other display requests for Family Trees otherwise I'm going to close out this thread.


Kevin