Tony Collen wrote:
David Crossley wrote:
Erk, i do not want to pour water on your efforts, but i was already really happy with the original design. The only thing that i would have changed would be to make the top part of the page be even more compact.
Welp, my personal opinion was that (putting it nicely) the page was lacking in the graphic design department. So I did something I thought was reasonable.
I see people's arguments about dilluting the Cocoon "brand". I can understand this because I worked in an advertising agency for a few years, and many years ago I came very close to going to school for Graphic Design rather than Computer Science.
I don't want to jeopardize the Cocoon brand by any means. I would like to express my concern about wanting to have a more professional image. Not necessarily more corporate looking, but I think a more polished look would greatly help the project, which led to my work.
One problem that I encounter a lot when building web sites and doing graphic design for people is that if a design is put in front of 50 people, you'll get 50 different suggestions as to how to make it better or more appealing. This makes it *very* hard to do something that everyone will agree to fully.
I've found a few ways around this situation:
- Ignore them, since you know better than they do (arrogant)
- Try to appease everybody fully (doesn't work)
- Take their suggestions into consideration, but keep working forward (useful, practical)
- Try to compromise between what people want and what you think should happen (best IMO)
Obviously, I favor the compromise route. Like I said, the page design bugged me enough to do something about it. Now I think we should find some sort of a compromise that won't dillute the Cocoon "brand" but try to snazz up the pages as much as possible, without pissing people off.
WDYT?
Tony, as wrote in my previous email, the logo was designed to be simple, with a few colors, in order to be easier to print on things.
Your version of the logo, although graphically more appealing, is too complex for that.
Also, simply put, we don't need a new logo as we don't need to signal any change in direction.
Regards,
Tony, who thought long and hard over the weekend about this message, and was originally angry about the poor reaction but got over it since he shouldn't take people's reactions as an attack against him personally.
Right, there is nothing personal and there is always a strong inertia in any visual identity changes.
While I admit I have a personal bias since I'm the one who designed the logo in the first place, the previous Cocoon 1.x logo was even more graphically appealing than this but was hell to do anything with rather than show on a web page. Thus the need for redesign (also to signal a new generation of the project).
Right now, we have no need to change it since it's serving us perfectly for the job.
Again, I'm talking about the logo only. If you want to improve the stylesheets of the page, go for it.
P.S. The cocoon2.ai Illustrator file in the current CVS won't even open in the latest version of Illustrator. This is bad because if we lose this file, we face losing original artwork.
This is probably a newline corruption error. the file should be treated as binary but CVS sometimes thinks it's text.
-- Stefano.
smime.p7s
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