Re: [Tails-dev] Making our website cuter, friendlier and mor…

hi,

intrigeri:

> What I'd like to see (but will *not* do myself)
> ===============================================
>
> Of course, considering the context provided above, all what follows
> shall be taken with a pinch of salt, criticized, and entirely
> revisited by people who are either experts in the design field, or
> more easily affected than me by this kawaii thingie, or both.
>
> * I'd like someone who visits our website for the first time to feel
> welcome and, perhaps more importantly: personally engaged.
>
> * I'd like to have enough cute-ish graphical hints on the homepage to
> make the people who're into this kind of things more comfortable.
>
> Don't worry, people like me probably won't consciously notice these
> hints, as long as we're not displaying kitten fullscreen. Oh, but
> even if we don't notice it, it might help making us more comfortable
> too ;)
>
> * I acknowledge that any implementation of the above requires to leave
> more room for calls to emotions, personalized messages, examples...
> and thus less room for cold, hard, general facts. (As a side note,
> I guess that reorganizing the important info we'll drop, so that it
> is still easily discoverable, will be a challenge, but oh well, some
> people are just good at this kind of refactoring :)
>
> * All this probably calls for revamping our homepage, and perhaps even
> (as suggested by Tchou) for creating different landing pages, aimed
> at different audiences (e.g. first-time visitor, existing user,
> potential contributor, you name it).

Agreed, this is also what i would like to see on the long run.

Rather than insist on the cute-part, I'd say that the website may need a
little bit of non-intrusive, real, graphic design. Graphic design which
improves readability and makes information easy enough to find, while
being appealing to the Reptilian Brain through colours and forms that
make people feel welcome.

I like the idea, but if we want to work on this together we'd need a
mailing list to organize this type of work (like tor-www). I would be
interested on working on this and on providing some information on what
should actually appear on the homepage (could work this out with Tchou
and sajolida).

Furthermore, i can ask some graphic designers I know IRL for concrete
proposals. There could also be a call for submitting graphical
mock-ups/ideas like was done for the logo.

However, there should not be such a tight schedule and there must be
room for discussions on the different proposals. As I always say: a good
design takes time and it is very important to respect a design process.

The graphic designers themselves could get involved in these discussions
via the mailing list.

However, design is also a very subjective issue, so Tails core
developers should absolutely take part at least in the final decisions
before any real work would be carried out on the website.

Not to forget, thank you all for the work previously done on the
website. I found it always very unique. However, it's true that it's
getting a bit oldish :)

Cheers !
u.