On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 04:20, Hans-Christoph Steiner <hans at at.or.at
yes i have to admit i'm starting to judge the relevancy of a
website at least in part with design modernity. was just looking
at various open source 3D gaming engines and i could instantly
tell the 2003-2007 era from the 2008-2012 era. i still
investigated what each site had to offer, but graphic presentation
added to the friendliness/accessibility factor. sites like the
current Processing site and Openframeworks.cc seem cleaner and
easier to both attract users and navigate.
overall an excellent beginning to a new look! it started me
thinking about possible further improvements. so consider this a
design brainstorm thingy with NO obligation that anyone has to do
what i'm suggesting (especially Marco who started the ball
rolling). i don't have any time to do it at the moment (i'm
avoiding grading right now) but it certainly gives me ideas, so
Navigation
i'm not pushing this but it seems like side based navigation is
sort of less common on modern websites? the look is pretty modern
and clean however. Processing (2 columns) and Ofx (2 or 3 - not
sure) both use top navigation which i think draws the eye better.
i resisted top nav for a while but i think it relates better to
subject matter. bigger more graphic pictures on the front page of
various projects i think will attract more attention to the
artistic aspects. a better top banner is a MUST.
Exhibition page
should definitely be overhauled with a much more graphic look
whenever possible. Marco's Xth-Sense, Billy's Helmholtz ship
animation any other graphic demonstrations of PD in action in
realtime either audio wise or using video manipulation ala Gem or
whatever should be there in plain view, not just a link to
someone's website. No idea if Plone can do graphic grid placement
of thumbnails for videos but that's what comes to mind. i'm not
against a carousel video thing, but i think it's a consideration
for future design.
if it's just a patch processing audio, i don't know, maybe some
audio examples of the patch via a jquery-type player onscreen? the
idea is to get folks interested equally in what PD can do as well
as finding out more information about the artist if they are so
inclined.
Sounds like good ideas. If you think those projects should be on
http://puredata.info/docs/sitedocs/AddingToTheExhibition
The only rule is that you can't put projects in the exhibition
that you had something to do with (no self-promotion).
Downloads and Distributions - separate categories
at the moment if i wanted to find out what PD-vanilla or
PD-extended was, i'd have to go to the Downloads page. i'm not
sure if that's intuitive enough. if i wanted to find out what a
distribution was about versus downloading it, i'm not sure if i'd
go to Downloads.
so maybe something labeled Distributions? then put PD-vanilla,
PD-extended, and something like l2ork there? i see a huge amount
of talk on the list from Ivo about his version and some of it's
benefits. i think it should be listed there. there should be
Download links of course as well.
Such a page might also be called 'About PD', give a brief
history/description of how PD itself works and then the other
variants listed below with download links?
One of the download sections is labels "distros". Not good enough?
.hc
Wouldn't l2ork belong there? If yes, is it technically possible to
have it updated there?
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