Item23: New project site design

Design Roadmap

1. MichaelDaum and CarloSchulz will meet on 3rd or 4th November to finish work on the NatSkin implementation of Carlo's T*ForNormalUsers work.
2. If no one objects (and delivers a better solution) this will become our temporary design for this website
   • our next release will definitly need a more lightweighted solution than the NatSkin so we need to work out a solution for the release as well.
   • Ideas and volunteers are highly appreciated!
3. In the meantime CarloSchulz works on wireframes, sketching what might result in the new interface for our next major release.
   • Note: we still need to design. the wireframes just sketch up the general layout and functionality, not the design in terms of colors, margins, icons and stuff.

Related topics

• FindingANewNameLocked

Sponsoring of work for a logo

MartinSeibert has offered to sponsor a logo incl. colors and fonts as work done by his company. They are committed to invest 40 hours of work for this first part of the project. Nothing concrete yet. From the logs:

Recent design work from T.o

ArthurClements did a tremendous job creating a new design for the old T.o site. Well, this work is down the drain there but could possibly be reused on the new project. Arthur, feel free to elaborate what you have and what you think.

T*ForNormalUsers

Carlo's T*ForNormalUsers has been implemented as well based on NatSkin. Not everybody is happy with that sort of a radical shift in terms of skinning. However, Carlo's work showed quite some interest in the community.

More at FoswikiForNormalUsers.

Discussion

I will be happy to continue work here.

-- ArthurClemens - 28 Oct 2008

Since Arthur and Carlo have given so much time already working on all sorts of design for t.o. and other sites I suppose it makes sense if the newly created community gives them ownership of the look and feel of its web site and enables them to deploy their best ideas ASAP; hoping that design excellence will help give NextWiki a good start.

-- StephaneLenclud - 28 Oct 2008

I think, that the comments above perfectly match, what our designers have in mind. We "only" would create the logo, colors and fonts. That's it.

-- MartinSeibert - 28 Oct 2008

@Arthur, glad to hear that.

-- MichaelDaum - 28 Oct 2008

I fully support Arthurs / Carlo`s work. I would like to support them in ways i can, especially with jquery-ui-dialogs for additional web2.0 stuff. I had a client which needed with that kind of things lately, so i kind of in the docs right now.

I would also help them putting the stuff online, as i have done some template theming myself.

If this help is even needed, you came along without me till now

-- EugenMayer - 28 Oct 2008

I'm currently drafting some wireframes for a new T**** user interface (no design just functional wireframes). Will upload when ready to discuss.

Ideal flow would be to take the wireframes to draft the actual design.

For now, if people feel my T*ForNormalUsers design is too radical I'm happy to help out on a different design as well.

-- CarloSchulz - 28 Oct 2008

I liked your Normal Users design, and will implement it in WidgetsSkin - I hope we get your design rendered in nat and pattern skins too - so we can offer different options with a similar l&f.

-- SvenDowideit - 28 Oct 2008

Question is: What is the fastest way of having a good design solution for this site?

-- CarloSchulz - 28 Oct 2008

To have one person with a vision take the lead and coordinate others to produce that solution.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 29 Oct 2008

I would also say, that everybody that is ready to contribute to this should stand up and act. I do not see to much potential for redundancy. We will be able to adapt later also. Our designers will probably need a time of 3-4 weeks from the start of the logo-project. I will tell here, as soon as I have a definite go from our internal management team.

-- MartinSeibert - 29 Oct 2008

Ok, I'm willing to do that.

Anyone objects in using NatSkin with a T*ForNormalUsers like style for now? It is not meant as a permanent solution it is just the fastest way I see to turn the vision/ideas I have into reality.

-- CarloSchulz - 29 Oct 2008

Hope you don't mind an average user chipping in - I'd say simply use this skin with a new logo/identity for now, then add in the normal users stuff later.

That then gives Carlo and folks time to work on the Normal Users stuff. I think you'll have enough to do removing the T word everywhere and setting up new plugin repositories etc without complicating things by rolling a new skin / user experience on top.

Ideally, you can do it all in parallel, but this removes some dependencies on getting the first release out the door.

-- JaseWickham - 29 Oct 2008

There are new screenshots at FoswikiForNormalUsers.

-- MichaelDaum - 29 Oct 2008

I've noticed the Jump bar is missing from here and the shots at FoswikiForNormalUsers. I really miss it. Does anyone else feel the same?

-- AndrewJones - 29 Oct 2008

On FoswikiForNormalUsers, searching and jumping is done using the same entry field.

-- MichaelDaum - 29 Oct 2008

I'd be happy to pitch in some user testing on this. If anybody wants to suggest some tasks, I can run some tests and post the results.

-- AaronFuleki - 29 Oct 2008

Aaron, that's cool. I'm working on wireframes for what might be the interface of our next release after the re-architecturing has happened. definetly need to test that

-- CarloSchulz - 29 Oct 2008

I think the best way is to use a stable but nice looking skins for visitors of the main site. Devs / advanced users are adviced to use the "new" skin and give the feedback back to the designers. So we are testing the skin while its developed, if needed devs can switch/fallback to a other skin of functionallity breaks.

This would speed up the process and always lets us see how the skin works with "real" not "test content".

-- EugenMayer - 29 Oct 2008

Michael (Carlo?) nice work and the use of blue (calm) or green (hope) is better!!!

-- WolfMarbach - 30 Oct 2008

Here's a Screenshot using COCOMINT just to complete a design with a potential new project name.

-- MichaelDaum - 04 Nov 2008 - 20:10