[theforum] front end urls

Erika Meyer ekm at seastorm.com
Tue Jan 13 14:13:01 CST 2009


Sarah, I appreciate your feedback.

Sarah Adams wrote:
>Most of all,
> though, I really don't like that the design is dictated by the
> far-too-limited and not-very-pretty colour scheme of the evolt blocks.
> The blocks are great as a brand logo, but I think they could use some
> tweaking/updating, and we're tying ourselves down to the blue, red, and
> green scheme. 

Unlike most of the things you noted, I think this is a decision that's 
been made already, by tradition and re-enforced in the feedback given on 
earlier designs.

While I like or at least don't mind riffing off the logo as a design 
element, at first, I didn't use black in it.  More than one person 
argued for black behind the cubes.  That tends to lead toward a 
neon/black feel, which is honestly, fine by me. Pretty? nah. It's more 
geeky/limiting/traditonal.  Think hotwired style.  RGB is a nod to the 
limits that web designers deal with IMO.

Not just that, but we seem to be limiting ourselves to
> three areas of the site when that isn't necessarily what we need - our
> IA should not be dictated by the number of colours in our logo! 

It isn't/won't be.

I think our IA is honestly dictated by a lot of things that are less 
than ideal, however.  Assuming the design gets finished and put into 
drupal, part of what dictates our IA is how much content our members are 
realistically going to create, organize, and maintain.

Right now, all our content fits reasonably into the categories of : 
lists, browsers, articles  -- *except* for "meta" content (about us, 
faq, user pages, etc) that applies to all of evolt.org (I think of 
"support evolt.org" is a subset of the meta-content).  So that in itself 
is more than 3 "categories"... I haven't mocked up any of those pages 
yet, though I have ideas for how.

What will  change our IA significantly is developing out the 
"planet.evolt.org" or whatever it ends up being called, the community 
pages (maps, blog aggregator, books by members I dunno what else).  I 
think that's a bridge we should cross when we get there but I think 
making that section simply another color (like purple) is a perfectly 
valid solution.

Evolt 2.0 IIRC involved at least 5 colors?  Some were shades of the same 
color?  Anyway...  I think that my concept, and our historical concept, 
of how color is used, varies with the IA, and is not *just* RGB.

Ultimately, I think someone should run a quick n' dirty usability study 
of the site once it's up and running.

Since there are very few graphics to contend with, altering the entire 
color scheme should be easy beans even *after* the site is running in 
drupal.

Erika









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