[theforum]

[William Anderson]

Martin Burns wrote:
> [snip]
> 
> Right now, I don't know whether the imperfections in this - or to be
> honest, pretty much any - new design are fundamental or can be resolved
> through incremental improvement. And I don't think we *can* know until
> it's a live site and we've lived with it for a bit.

If you can't tell after living and breathing it for the last month or two
during the construction process, you'll never know.  I say open the doors
*now* to the community and say "redesign it for us; you'll win fame and
glory".  Look how well the mefi redesign contest worked out?  Matt picked
three great looking designs *for mefi* and intends to plunder all three for
their new look.  We should have done the same thing months ago.  Look at
stopdesign, adaptive path: lush.  Why can't we look as good as these sites?

Let's do it now before it's really way too late, because imo launching what
we have now will get us laughed at.

Absolutely no disrespect to those who have kicked arse over the last couple
of months getting the guts of drupal and the theme working, but imo the
*design* just doesn't work.  it's bland and breaks in key places, i.e. the
left hand column on short pages.  The blandness really kills me.  I was
keeping schtum what with all the crying over deadlines etc, but I really
can't after a blow-up with martin on irc earlier tonight.

The redesign on an aesthetic level sucks in my humble opinion.  Let's get
the community in to help, big time, and let's make a huge thing of it.
Let's make it something people *want* to get involved in and get it deployed
*fast, fast, fast*.  I'm not giving timescales, because apparently I am shit
at figuring out timescales, but let's get more eyeballs and more pairs of
hands involved.  The percentage of worker bees to drone bees must be
astronomically small.  You might not be prepared to sacrifice in the name of
bettering our work, but some of us might be!  More bees!  Tastier honey!

-- 
_ __/|  William Anderson      | "There's something about records which is
\`O_o'  neuro at well dot com |  really satisfying."
=(_ _)= http://neuro.me.uk/   |     -- John Peel (1939 - 2004)
   U  - Thhbt! GPG 0xFA5F1100 |