On Sunday, 18 January 2015 at 04:44:56 UTC, Israel wrote:
On Sunday, 18 January 2015 at 02:18:16 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
I took the better part of today working on this:
https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dlang.org/pull/780.
See demo at http://erdani.com/d/.
What do you all think? Is it an improvement over what we have
now?
I'd appreciate your help with reviewing and pulling this, and
also with improving the colors (which I'm terrible at) and
page tracking as mentioned in the pull request.
I'm no designer, but I do have some comments. Without consistency
it just looks a bunch of parts rather than a singular thing. Some
elements have gradients, some don't. Some elements have round
corners, some don't. Elements with borders use different widths,
some have none. In regards to borders, we engineering types
(maybe it's just me) tend to put boxes around stuff to represent
discrete units when basic design concepts, like proximity and
contrast, may be better suited for the task. I just took a quick
pass at it in the browser:
Original:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/114394/D-site/current.png
Cleanup: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/114394/D-site/001.png
Cleanup w/o bg:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/114394/D-site/002.png
Think "consistency and subtlety". Good design generally goes
unnoticed.
Too much code, I know its what you want people to see but if
the entire length of the website consists of giant blocks of
code it just doesnt look as pleasing to the eyes...
put all of that code and introduction to D into a subpage
called "About"/"Intro to D". have it be the first subpage on
the left column.
The front page should be updated with new content like your
tweets, forum posts, articles from other websites,reddit, etc.
maybe under the documentation put a "Getting started" Tutorial?
I agree, from a new user perspective all the code might seem like
a bit much. It might be a good to have short blurb about "Why D?"
or "What is D?" or something. I also like the idea of
highlighting some key projects, particularly ones with broad
appeal (dub and VisualD come to mind). I would recommend keeping
things like blog posts, tweets, etc. out of the the main content
(on the side or bottom is fine). External sources usually make no
sense to a new user, or are generic press pieces which are
unnecessary because the person is already on the site.
-Dave
