SEUL: Re: [Freehive-web] SEUL logo/site?

[Roger Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

In message <w4yd84xwpv0.fsf@vibrator.styx.net>, leo@styx.net writes:
>> It looks like the discussion has died down a lot re: the seul logo.
>> I think the final conclusion was that what you guys had originally
>> written, possibly with dots in between the letters, possibly in a
>> different font, is the way to go? Any progress on that, Leo?
>
>Ok, survived a vacation in the snow and new years eve, not bad at all. Now it's
>back to work, both for styx and for freehive. I'd like to stop screwing around
>with the logo for a bit now, I think what we've come up with now would just
>about be:
>
>http://www.freehive.org/projects/seul/seul-leo-1.gif
>
>It's simple, it's clean, it will look nice in black and white and it's not too
>bad of a design.

Looks good.

One comment I got when I asked around:
|I liked it better with the lowercase letters, but this is
|nice. Shrunk to 1/3 size and with the bottom chopped off,
|it's pretty good. If the bottom's going to stay on, though,
|and stay uppercase, it should be either made monospace or
|kerned properly. This looks weird (especially in the words
|simple and linux)
When pressed for a definition, he said:
|kerning refers to moving characters closer together... AV,
|for example, in most fonts, can be moved such that they
|sort of overlap, with the left bar of the V going into the
|A's space. HH, in contrast, can't really be kerned. You can
|kern on both sides of Is a lot. The kerning on the bottom
|of this image looks weird.

It looks like this is designed to be able to have a transparent background?
Is it useful/worthwhile to make it more suitable for that?

>> Also, you'd mentioned earlier that you were intending to do an entire
>> site redesign as well? I'd certainly be interested in discussing this. :)
>
>That's true. Although some sites get a lot of flack from redesigns (freshmeat)
>I'd have to say that total redesigns are good for sites once in a while. As
>SEUL will aquire a new logo with new colors it's only logical that they need to
>change the rest of the design to fitt these colors. The question then is if
>more should be done. I think that a few small additions to the design would be
>good, like adding the little coner things from the logo to different items in
>the site. This type of familiarity is always good for presentations, it get the
>user the feel more comfortable with the entire thing and it's very easy to do
>eyecandy.

That sounds reasonable, and like it would be very useful. Our index.html is just
html, so you can grab it and make modifications if you like. I'd be very happy
to see anything you come up with. There is certainly room for improvement.

But doing a more thorough redesign than that probably means somebody should
start looking into server-side include packages and figuring out what text
to put on each page. I'm hesitant to do this, because I tend to try to
minimize the size of each page, and it feels like I'm putting in useless
data if it's the same on each page.. But the argument for it is that people
coming in at some random page deep inside will know where they are and how
to get to the 'front'. This is especially important because our archives
have been grabbed by most of the search engines out there. I wonder if this
means we should only look into server-side-includes for the archives, and
let the other pages speak for themselves. That might be a good compromise.

>But, I think the final say on this really needs to come from the SEUL
>people. If they want a total redsign and to what extent, I'm quite sure that
>freehive is up to the task.

I've been keeping the seul people informed. The general consensus is that
if you come up with something better, we'll use it. Our current site is
far from perfect.. (but there might be some discussion over whether it's
'better' -- but that's good.)

The only concern I have is whether your time might be better spent
elsewhere. But I guess you don't seem to have that many people scrambling
to make use of you yet, so your work with seul might raise some publicity.

For instance, I'm trying to flush out some workers to help out with the Linux
News Project (linuxunited.org/projects/news/) -- right now I want somebody
who's good at html (webpage to input news items for redistribution to news
sites) to hook up with somebody who's pretty good with xml (platform
independent universal format for information transfer as well as for
archiving and indexing for searching) and passable at perl (cgi to glue
things together and send mail out if the inputs are good). I can do any of
these positions with a bit of start-up time cost, but I don't have the time
to spend right now. Anyway, this is an example of a project with much higher
priority than a seul website redesign..

>--Leo
>  Ole Utskot - styx design director - Freehive admin  

Thanks,
--Roger