On Mar 28, 2010, at 10:44 PM, Christopher Done wrote: > This is a post about re-designing the whole Haskell web site. > > We got a new logo but didn't really take it any further. For a while there's > been talk about a new design for the Haskell web site, and there are loads of > web pages about Haskell that don't follow a theme consistent with > Haskell.org's, probably because it doesn't really have a proper theme. > > I'm not a designer so take my suggestion with a grain of salt, but something > that showed pictures of the latest events and the feeds we currently have > would be nice. The feeds let you know that the community is busy, and > pictures tell you that we are human and friendly. > > Anyway, I came up with something to kick off a discussion: > > http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Image:Haskell-homepage-idea.png > > It answers the basic questions: > • What's Haskell? > • Where am I on the site? (Answered by a universally recognised tab > menu) > • What's it like? > • How do I learn it? > • Does it have an active community? > • What's going on in the community? What are they making? > • This language is weird. Are they human? -- Yes. The picture of a > recent event can fade from one to another with jQuery. > The colours aren't the most exciting, but someone who's a professional > designer could do a proper design. But I like the idea of the site being like > this; really busy but not scarily busy. > > Subsections of the site could use the header and footer and heading theme, > but have a completely different primary-content layout. Probably sub-sections > would need a left-nav. Keeping the design simple like this also makes it easy > to theme the current Wiki to fit in with it seamlessly. > > Personally I don't have a problem with the existing site, functionally. It > has all the stuff I want to look at. The only stuff that I had issue with as > a newbie was finding The One Book I Should Read and The One Download I Should > Get. The current site is starting to address this with a "Download Haskell" > button. However, looking at it as a marketing site, it does look pretty lame > and messy, and it gives you that impression of Haskell. So if people who own > the site are going to redesign it, I thought I'd contribute a bit. > > Anyway, please contribute your ideas. (Again, I'm not a designer, so you > don't need to pick at the aesthetics, a real designer can sort that out.) > > Cheers!
Nice work, definitely beats the current version! A few remarks: - Please throw in a bit more color somehow. Like said before, this shade of gray is a bit depressive. - The "more" links are far to prominent. These links are not that important and form a very distractive part of the design. Maybe you can right-align them and make them less button-like. - I would recommend to use a bit more conservative font for the headers and the headlines. Why not stick with Helvetica, Gill Sans or Myriad Pro? - Don't use a bold font-face in running text. - Align the bottom of the tabs headers with the content frame? - Maybe you can make the right column less wide, making is more easy to focus on the main content? These remarks might help to make the overall appearance a bit less heavy. Your design is quite lean and quiet, which is good, but some of the details make it a bit messy. Gr, -- Sebastiaan Visser _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
