Re: New logo and website design proposal

["Luis Felipe López Acevedo" <felipe.lopez@openmailbox.org>]

On 2015-09-21 15:40, ludo@gnu.org wrote:
> 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.


Glad to hear that :)


> 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


Ok, I'm taking note of this.


>>  - 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? ;-)).


I'll add a code section then, with placeholder examples.


> 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.


OK.


>   • 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?

OK.

>   • 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).

OK. How about "Learn"?


>   • 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?

OK. My idea was to use a Haunt blog, in a git repository where people in 
the community could contribute posts about anything Guile...

> Thanks a lot!
> 
> Ludo’.

Thanks for the feedback, Ludo’ :)


With the feedback so far, I'm planning to make a revision of the mockup 
this weekend to include the suggested changes.

I'll be alert to any other comments in the meantime.


-- 
Luis Felipe López Acevedo
http://sirgazil.bitbucket.org/