[Haskell-cafe] Haskellers design

[Nubis]

Hi guys,
I'm the author of that second design, although I'm not really a designer.
I'll try a variation using colors that resemble the 'official' ones so you
can choose which one you like better.
The thing is the current proposal uses 4 indicative colors and a greyscale
for the rest.
Green for general highlighting: Used in the overview section and all the
non-work related sections of the site.
Blue for haskellers, information mostly reelevant to people looking for
haskellers is in that color, so the 'find a haskeller' section and usernames
are in that color for example.
Orange for jobs, if you're looking for a job everything that's in orange may
be interesting to you.
Red is for site alerts or messages that prompt you to do something, like
registering or notifying you should add your screen name to your profile.

I think maybe I can use some shade of grey to replace green and red, and use
the 'official' maroon (red?) and blueish instead of red and blue.

Not that I want to start a debate, but below are my views on having an
official look, as I shared in a private conversation a few days back:

I'm not sold on the benefits of having the same palette across all sites.
I think the point mark Lentczner Makes about using different layouts also
applies to colors.
Colors also carry a message, they let you know for example if a website is
informal, technical, institutional, etc.
Visual consistency helps usability a lot, I probably wouldn't have different
layouts and colors for different parts of the same site. To me, everything
that's inside the same domain name should look consistent.
The other benefit of consistency is for brand recognition, ACME would make
their paper towels and soap look related, so if you like ACME's soap you're
more inclined towards buying also their paper towels instead of their
competitor's. Even then, some companies make some products look totally
unrelated so if the new product fails it doesn't hurt their other products
perception.
I don't think we need brand consistency since we don't have a central
authority to respond to, the only thing we have in common is haskell, we
even have several implementations, and we may as well have several projects
doing the same thing in different ways in our quest for the best.
Some people may even look for consistency with different things, someone may
try to mimic the design on linked.in for a strictly job-board like website,
or google's for a haskell search engine ( hehe :)
In some other places, consistency may be downright harmful and get you
confused about the site you're on. It's like those projects who keep their
documentation in 'trac's default theme and you don't know right away what
you're looking at or where you saw that snippet you need to use again. Local
user group's sites are another example, every local user group has their own
personality, and if consistent, we'll end up with a lot of sites that look
confusing and boringly similar.
I think we should rather err on the side of accepting much needed
contributions, and leaving it up to each developer to evaluate their
project's affinity with other projects in the community to mimic their color
scheme and even their layout as they see fit. Access to graphics sources
would be of great help for this.
All in all, I think design inconsistency makes it look friendlier for people
to contribute and shows the diversity we have in the haskell community. Both
are among the main reasons communities like ruby's and python's became so
widespread.


Cheers!
----nubis :)

On Thu, Oct 21, 2010 at 3:41 PM, Gregory Collins <greg at gregorycollins.net>wrote:

> Christopher Done <chrisdone at googlemail.com> writes:
>
> > I like the colour theme of the former and the layout of the latter.
>
> Precisely what I was going to say.
>
> G
> --
> Gregory Collins <greg at gregorycollins.net>
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