From: Michal Suchanek <hramrach@...>
Date: 2006-06-21T19:28:37+09:00
Subject: Re: ruby-lang.org redesign?

On 6/20/06, John W. Long <ng@johnwlong.com> wrote:
> Michal Suchanek wrote:
> > Well, the site is not exactly friendly to people who might want to
> > save it and edit the  stylesheets.
> >
> > ...
>
> Michal. I appreciate your interest in the Ruby-Lang design.
>
> I don't think now is the time to address the issues you have raised. Not
> that you aren't raising valid points. There are things that I would like
> to change about the design myself, but we are really working hard to get
> this out the door. Please understand that the people working on the site
> have already invested many, many hours into it. I've personally invested
> hundreds of hours into the site (on both the design and programming).

Maybe it is not the time now but technical problems of the visual
design should be addressed before the site is launched.
I appreciate your work on the new design. Since it is supposed to be
based on cms that can apply different templates it should be possible
to change the visual design easily.

However, only your team has access to the templates so there is not
much else for me to do but complain. My email was partly in reply to
the question by James what would be access to the templates good for.
Here I would like to point out that access to the site is not much
help for developing alternate templates without access to the actual
templates.

Even if you are not ready to accept the templates now developing a
proper usable template (as opposed to a quick CSS hack) takes time. If
you make the current content accessible when you are ready to accept
modifications you will have to wait some time before you get any I
guess.


>
> One of the things I've learned while working on this project is that
> there are often several valid ways of looking at a design. There are
> people who prefer a clean simplistic design. Others prefer subtle
> gradients, shinny buttons, and a fixed-width design. It's not so much a
> question of right or wrong. It's a question of personal taste.

Certainly. One design cannot satisfy everybody because different
people have different tastes. And use different hardware to view the
site which may affect how they percieve color contrasts, etc.

I think the new design is more conservative that the current red only
design and would be easier for newcomers. It also provides sufficient
contrast for the text to be visible (when the images are present). It
does not make the text stand out too much to be comfortable to read
like those bright white on black sites do.

However, technical issues are not a matter of taste. And since the
screens today are far from the same size making the site fixed size
does look like a technical issue to me.


Thanks

Michal