Re: New logo and website design proposal

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Hello!

Luis Felipe López Acevedo <felipe.lopez@openmailbox.org> skribis:

> As part of the Guile project I imagine, I'd like to propose these
> visual modifications for the logo and the website.
>
> Logo
> https://multimedialib.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/guile-logo-proposal-2015-06-16.png

I like it!

> Website mockup (some rough sketches here)
> https://multimedialib.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/website-mockup-2015-09-15.png
>
> My intention with this proposal is, hopefully, to modernize the image
> of the project a bit and make it more attractive to potential users.

This is amazing!  I really like the web site mockup.  The drawings are
just awesome.

Christopher Allan Webber <cwebber@dustycloud.org> skribis:

> First of all, I think this looks *amazing*!  Will it keep these kind of
> nice black and white drawings, or will the final result have a more
> refined look?  Either way, I like the childrens' book type
> illustrations.  (My request would be that if they do become colored, the
> two children-programmers whose bodies are somewhat visible have
> different skin tones for diversity reasons.  I think they look gender
> ambiguous enough because of the suits.)  Honestly I think the rough
> black and white versions look very nice as-is though, and I am not sure
> how to color them without a kind of watercolor look.  Very "Where the
> Wild Things Are" meets robots.  A good combination!

I would leave them as is; I think it’s fine without colors.

> Second, a friend of mine pointed out a couple of things:
>
>  - The "Guile is an extension language platform" section gives the
>    impression maybe overly that it's an extension language far and above
>    being an independent language.  Guile is certainly optimized for
>    this, especially for legacy reasons, but more and more Guile
>    applications seem to be written entirely within Guile itself.

+1

>  Maybe the text could be something like:
>
>      "Guile contains a neat and highly optimized virtual machine.

Or rather “… an efficient compiler and virtual machine.”

>      It can be used out of the box to write programs in Scheme, or
>      can easily be integrated with C and C++ programs.
>
>      Guile is the GNU Ubiquitous Intelligent Language for Extensions,
>      and the official extension language of the GNU project."

+1

>  - It may be nice to show code examples.  Lisp is often interpreted as
>    being hard to read; I have found that a nice theme and
>    rainbow-parentheses has reduced that fear for some users.  Here's
>    some examples of screenshots I have taken of my own emacs with
>    various lisps... none of them are perfect, and this isn't scheme
>    code, but to get the general idea:
>
>      http://dustycloud.org/tmp/emacs_lisp_setup.png
>        ^- Probably could do without the highlighting?
>
>      http://dustycloud.org/tmp/emacs-rainbow-all-the-things.png
>        ^- Probably could do without the rainbow-delimeters?
>
>      http://dustycloud.org/tmp/emacs_wombat.png
>        ^- Something different, but also a nice theme
>
>    I'm not 100% confident on this; showing "real code" might actually
>    clutter things or make things more intimidating.  The present
>    design I think is fairly intimidation-free.

Maybe these could go under “Getting Started”?

I like what racket-lang.org does with the cycling code examples.  An
option would be to still their idea (and code? ;-)).

Other comments:

  • In the “Extend applications” part, I would remove Lua, move ECMA to
    the back on the drawing, and add Scheme to the front; we might even
    replace ECMA with C.  In general, we don’t want to emphasize
    multiple-language support, so I would also remove it from the
    heading.

  • The “Applications” part is a good idea.  Unfortunately, we cannot
    (yet!) have LilyPond there (its port to Guile 2.0 is incomplete) and
    TeXmacs (not sure what the status is.)

    Perhaps Guile-Charting, Guile-Present, or Guile-OpenGL would make
    for a nice picture, or maybe Guile-SSH for a black terminal-like
    geeky image?

  • I noticed with the Guix web site that “Help” is a bit confusing
    since it’s about getting help and not about helping out
    (contributing).

  • I think we can remove “Blog”, but a news section would be welcome,
    possibly with a preview on the main page as you did for Guix?

Thanks a lot!

Ludo’.