Re: Design points from designer friends - for discussion at IRC meeting tonight.

[Bernelle Verster <bernellev@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Mar 4, 2015 at 5:33 PM, Allison Randal <allison@lohutok.net> wrote:

On 03/04/2015 07:17 AM, Bernelle Verster wrote:

As I told Martin, at this early stage I want to push to see how far I
can get, as poor design really irritates me, and good design takes time,
not necessarily money. If we are going for the 'turd polishing', I can
live with that, if I know I tried my best to get something better. Make
sense? I would just like to instigate some discussion to see what comes
of it. I am entirely prepared to see it shot down, ok?

Oh, I'm not discouraging you, I've been working on improving the design quality of DebConf for years. I'm mostly saying "go for it!", but suggesting to focus your effort *this year* on the DebConf 16 site. It seems more likely to me that we'll find a volunteer designer willing to start with one site designed-from-scratch, than a volunteer willing to update a pile of sites.

 

As part of my 'orga-docs' job (currently only for personal use... there was some other convo's in parallel that didn't like this idea), I'd like to suggest setting the debian logo as a standard - the exact colour, the little pixely bits that debian.org has but debconf.org doesn't, all those little details. Choose a typeface, font weight, alignment for the logo etc and use that throughout. Choose a Debian colour/few colours and set that. Choose a position for the subtitle, amount of whitespace and set that for all uses of the logo. Create a template in, I guess, a gimp file (I'm guessing adobe illustrator or .eps or .psd will give madduck the fits?). Make this available on the debconf website for future use.

We can do this for DC16, document it properly on a webpage, and motivate that future DC's use it, and possibly Debian at large. So not changing things per se, but aligning them. So we're focusing on DC16 but keeping it in the back of our mind that this needs to be documented and adaptable.

If we don't completely burn the designer out, then sure, they might stick around and work on other things. They'd be a familiar face around DebConf by then, which would make it much easier for them to work more broad changes through the system.

Agreed, good point. :)

Allison