On Sat, Aug 15, 2009 at 11:10 AM, Joshua A. Andler
<scislac@...847...0...> wrote:
On Fri, 2009-08-14 at 11:04 -0300, bulia byak wrote:
> In my humble opinion, all site designs I've seen so far, including our
> current one, lack one critical thing: art.
Agreed. I have already mentioned to Chris about how we used to have the
screenshots randomly show on the homepage. I do think that having this
back again would be great in addition to your suggestion below.
Yup, that's going in.
> I propose that our web site's front page should incorporate a large
> enough image, created in Inkscape, at least as well done as our About
> screens and ideally better. Like a banner, perhaps integrated with the
> "Inkscape" heading.
>
> We could even rotate them once per month or so, if we find enough good
> candidates (and there are plenty of good Inkscape art for example on
> Deviantart, we can just contact directly authors of nice pieces
> offering them this free publicity :).
> Of course this requires that someone takes the responsibility to
> choose a piece of art (I don't think we should do monthly
> competitions, it's too much overhead), nicely crop it to our format
> and otherwise integrate it with the web site, perhaps even changing
> the color scheme of the site to match the new front page art piece.
> Such a person must have good design sense and be ready to spend some
> time regularly on updating our web site.
I think that the banner/header idea rocks. I would go ahead and initiate
contact with a some DA users and line up a dozen or so images
immediately so we can figure out the best format/look and be good for a
year basically.
However, I don't think that this is a good plan as originally proposed anyway; a website should be usable and not obstruct the user from finding the important content: usually this will be what is it (about), and how do I get it (downloads). Screenshots or demonstrations are great - but they mustn't be allowed to take over. My theme already fills up the header area enough that you could't fit a decent-sized one in the header anyway.
I don't see anything wrong with having a random picture in a block, 200px wide, and for the front page, even possibly larger, but I think it has got to be done carefully with usability in mind. To my mind at least, it can't be allowed to go above the big links on the front page. And it's got to fit in.
Also, since we are in Feature Freeze and will not be seeing any more UI
changes, I will be uploading the screenshots for 0.47 that I lined up
over the weekend.
Good :-)