[indiana-discuss] [website-discuss] opensolaris.com designs

[Dan Price]

On Wed 16 Apr 2008 at 04:28PM, Mark Phalan wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 2008-04-16 at 13:01 +1200, Glynn Foster wrote:
> > Hey,
> > 
> > As opensolaris.com starts to focus more on the 'download, install and run' 
> > experience, catering towards the consumer rather than the producer, a few people 
> > in Sun have been working on a design separate to that of the current 
> > opensolaris.org. The following is the latest iteration of that design -
> > 
> >    http://www.gnome.org/~gman/opensolaris-new/index.html
> > 
> > Much of the content is still being worked out [1].
> > 
> > opensolaris.org will continue to be the live hub for most of the day-to-day 
> > activity we currently see across the projects and community groups - nothing 
> > changes there, though hopefully the benefit is that it will relieve some of the 
> > burden from opensolaris.org on trying to cater for 2 pretty distinct audiences 
> > than it was originally intended for.
> > 
> > Have a play with the mockup, tell me what you think!
> 
> 
> Looks very nice. Is the long term plan to go with a similar theme on the
> opensolaris.org website?

Agreed, very attractive overall.  A couple of thoughts:

Home page: Lack of left-to-right symmetry in color usage is a little
odd---  the human heads are oddly homogenous (shouldn't they be more
diverse?) whereas the circles come in many colors.  Ditto with "share"
bubbles.  To me the human icons make more sense for "share", perhaps in
conjunction with the bubbles.  What if they were all rendered greyscale
until you mouse over them?

Share should include something more instantaneous than forums: chat,
perhaps.

I'm confused by the use of "developer forums" on the "share" page...
aren't these user forums?

Design of download area should factor in multiple download methods-- and
design for that.  Current openoffice pages do this rather well.  I
didn't think the download area was especially well laid out-- there's a
tiny link at the top called "CD" and then a giant arrow further down.
In some places on the page, the arrow is something you can click on.
In some places it's decoration.  That's not OK.

Don't love the arrow icon too much.  It just somehow doesn't fit.  How
about something more organic and less metallic?

Pages claim to be XHTML 1.0 strict, but aren't.  I just hate when people
do that.  See
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gnome.org%2F%7Egman%2Fopensolaris-new%2Findex.html&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0

        -dp

-- 
Daniel Price - Solaris Kernel Engineering - dp at eng.sun.com - blogs.sun.com/dp