Hullllloooooooooo again TEAM! Great, constructive feedback all around people! ;- Astron: thank you millions for your support and for being open to changes to your modified logo. Also, well-spotted with the footer segmented-green-border. It was also the one element that I was most displeased with before submitting, but it was 2:00am and I grew tired+lazy and submitted anyway. Self-imposed deadlines: a Designer's best friend and worst enemy (other than clients! ... ha, I joke)
I think what you suggest would indeed work better. - Andrew: thanks for the thumbs-up. Gradients are a UI's saviour y'know.- Christoph: Boss, I couldn't agree more, action-items are very much required. And IMAGES! which is our greatest downfall so far. But as I mentioned, I assumed that content-discussions may have already taken place and I wasn't about to radically contradict the outcomes. While I have opinions of what could be on that site, I will leave the content-discussion/decisions to people more capable such as yourself and our Usability-brethren (but I will add some suggestions below rather than being cryptic). Having said that, I don't think we need to get the contents perfect before the Design can be fixed. I personally would love to see some more iterative implementation because I have come to realise that sometimes we (the Design Team) aim for perfection and action never occurs as a result of our hesitation. But the Extensions site is LIVE. Any immediate improvement that can be implemented NOW, should not be suspended because of a perfect improvement that might happen LATER. But... (and it gives me more pride than you can imagine to say this, now that we have formalised leadership that we have been craving for EVER) it IS your call =)
- Andreas: attention is a funny thing in Graphic Design, when trying to balance "size" with "empty-space" you have to remember that there is an inverse-bell-curve, where too much or too little empty space /attracts/ attention and a "balanced" compromise makes people feel comfortable, but uninterested. For the logo I think we should go with this "boring" balance because like you say, the logo isn't the major player on that page, the Navigation is. But interesting to note in that principle, is that something SMALL, when surrounded by luxuriant empty space, catches attention. While I've never formalised that in any discussion on-list so far, I think that is the method LibO should employ in its branding language. It should become our mantra. Empty space (not necessarily /white/, but /negative/) is our friend.
...Personally, if you don't mind my opinion, I would actually change the landing page quite a bit. An explanation IS essential, but if I were to land on an exentsions site, the MOST Important thing I'd like to see is a big fat search box or categorised index. Maybe some of the best-rated / most-popular / newest-addition extensions. I would like to see a prominent "add an extension" and information/interview with Extension developers.
And on a personal note, all of this constant emphasis on donation is really starting to change my impression of LibO. A LOT! We went from a philosophy-driven endeavour which emphasised its focus on freedom (both speech AND expense) which rarely requested money.... to a seemingly money-hungry enterprise that wants more donations - more donations - MORE DONATIONS!
I know donations are our lifeblood, so don't get me wrong, but I think we should be doing this in a much more elegant way than banner-ads / home-page-hugging mentions of donations and never-ending mentions of money. Firefox does quite well by emphasising it's "community of volunteers" which makes you feel like supporting them, rather than all-consuming "donate NOW" instructions. Again, just my humble, and always controversial, opinions and nothing more.
Yet another long Email. I'll try and do more /Designing/ and less /writing/ with my remaining time.
And sorry for top-posting. -Nik On 11.10.23 10:35, Christoph Noack wrote:
Hi all, it is already 1:30 am, so wildly jumping into the discussion ... :-) Am Sonntag, den 23.10.2011, 00:02 +0200 schrieb Astron:Hi everybody, as the person who created the original version of sharp-triangled Extensions& Templates logo (ie [1]): I absolutely second Nik's request. If you need more of an eyecatcher, just make the entire image (a little) larger. The current logo looks butchered badly (and it is, given that I and later you modified Nik's good original logo).I also second Nik's request for several reasons. Furthermore, I'd like to add that the current logo needs an enormous amount of space that eats away space for the actual content of the page. I would even suggest to make the pages close to the default LibreOffice site, so that users feel at home (whilst knowing where to look for the logo). By the way, I know that you explained to me that its not possible to combine the Extensions and the Templates page ... so an idea for the future. The "X" could also be used for "LibreOffice E*x*tras" covering both topics.Overall, though, the focus shouldn't be on the logo too much, but rather on the content: a grid of newly-uploaded/curated/rave-reviewed extensions and only two lines of text would be great. By the way, your (Nik's) homepage proposal looks good apart from the fact that there's still no action on the site (see above).+1 The question to me is, what arethe most important tasks on the website? I guess ... 1. Getting extensions / templates ... so users should get an initial idea (so showing e.g. the most recent or best rated items -> from here, people should be able to get further collections) 2. Getting information about LibreOffice (to know that this is an official page, to get information about "us" if the user approaches the page by accident) 3. Upload their own content (this needs refinement as well ...) Our interest might also be to: ask for donations. Personally, I consider this a starting point for further "User oriented" changes. By the way, there are many categories to chose from (on the Templates page). It might be helpful if we could consider the survey results what people do with LibreOffice / OOo to make finding items easier. Does that sound interesting? [...] Cheers, Christoph
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