Re: New logo and website design proposal

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

On 2015-09-15 16:31, Christopher Allan Webber wrote:
> Luis Felipe López Acevedo writes:
> 
>> Hello list,
>> 
>> 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
>> 
>> 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.
>> 
>> 
>> Your comments are very welcomed,
> 
> 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!
> 

Ah, yes, the drawings are supposed to be just black and white. 
Personally, I also like the rough drawings as they are right now, but I 
will try to clean them or replace them if people don't like them.

Also, diversity, of course... That and simplicity are the reasons for 
using suits.

> 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.  Maybe
>    the text could be something like:
> 
>      "Guile contains a neat and highly optimized 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."
> 
>    That's a bit more verbose than the present text; I wonder if it can
>    be cleaned up?
> 


I'll let experts discuss this one.


>  - 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.
> 

I was going to include a section with code, but didn't know what kind of 
code to include. Something short, meaningful for beginners, and enough 
to see the syntax... I don't know. However, I don't mind if the code is 
saved for the manuals and tutorials.

> Anyway, what do you think?
> 
> I love the designs... keep on rocking!  I can't wait to see this
> deployed!
> 
>  - Chris

Thank you very much, Cris. Glad you like them :)

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