Identity and Design

[ghost]

Considering 2017 may see the bright light of 1.0, it may be a good time to start discussing the definition of Crystal visual personality and communication style.

I would aim to make Crystal's elegance and efficiency-via-essentiality universal and inherently visible in all of its forms and voices. Other than being, I suggest to accompany developer perception and experience into elegance and essentiality.

I took the liberty of starting from the logo to kickstart things up. I would love to see other suggestions from fellow designers or feedback and ideas from the community. I do not consider this direction to be of particular value.

I then focused on the website. Please, again, share any thought.

1440 ⨉ 900 (@2) [Fullscreen MacBook Pro Retina]

375 ⨉ 667 (@2) [Fullscreen iPhone 7]

I used #862E9C (purple) as a variant of the #2e1052 that appears in the docs.

I suggest the persistence of Moriston for <hN> + <p> and SF Mono for <code>. Forma DJR may be a potential alternative for <hN> + <p>. Within both environments, the view scrolls to more details (raw information and full navigation). For desktop, a more prominent action to discover details may aid interaction (possibly “Learn More” or “Get Started”).

I suggest to constrain the information-on-impact to the essential. Should my direction be determined to be of value, what is essential is of course up for research and debate. Currently presented information is in fact indicative.

(Thanks! :)

[sdogruyol]

This is awesome 😍

[molovo]

Big fan of this. I hate programming sites which hide code examples away behind a wall of text. Front and center is always better. Looking forward to seeing how this develops.

One thing I would say, the logo might be a little low contrast, especially in grayscale. Might be worth experimenting with the colour palette a little.

[RX14]

There's actually a current "open-secret" effort to redesign the website happening in the redesign branch of this repo. Here's some screenshots:

Mobile... needs some more work:

[idchlife]

Wow! I like both those styles. They are great! But somehow, don't you all think that purple color is not that user friendly as someone would think? I'm not a designer, but I'm more please with dark DOC theme rather than with purple white API page theme. Purple (at least this one) kinda seems like randomly chosen in dreamweaver and thrown into website.

[paulcsmith]

I personally prefer black and white as the main identity and I love the current logo. I like a lot of the ideas here though.

A few months ago someone also did a redesign that looks really nice IMO https://www.google.com/amp/s/vaporsoft.net/redesigning-crystal-lang-org/amp/?client=safari

Might be worth checking out to get some more ideas

[spalladino]

Thanks a lot @flagello for the contribution!! The design looks great indeed. However, as @RX14 pointed out, we are already way into the process of redesigning the site. Since the surprise has already been spoiled (jk), you can check how it's going at stg.crystal-lang.org.

Also, you brought up an important thing that we have been overlooking so far, that is the communication style, ie how CrystalLang speaks from Twitter, blog, and other accounts, regardless of who is the person actually writing. We'll discuss this with Manas marketing manager to get some ideas on how to handle it.

I'll share this with our designer, @jkicillof, so he can go through the ideas here. Thanks again!

[refi64]

Ehh...not to be a downer, but the purple looks really odd there to me...

[RX14]

Just as another data point on the purple, I actually quite like it. We already use a purple on the api docs and I think it looks super nice. In fact, I think that the redesign could do with a highlight colour (although not necessarily the same purple).

[ghost]

Thank you guys! I missed the redesign branch. I understand your approach may already be definitive. It's certainly an improvement, but I would be interested in continuing exploring other directions overall (site, guidebook, docs).

I would consider to encourage further community contributions and feedback in order to foster openness and harvest value that would otherwise be missed. More so in a front that had not received significant attention from the community itself.

(@kirbyfan64 I too prefer a monochrome palette.)

[spalladino]

@flagello if you're interested in exploring other sections, feel free to take a look at what we have designed so far for the book and the API reference. We haven't started implementing them, so suggestions are welcome. Keep in mind though that we fully give our designer the last word on how the site should look like ;-)

[RX14]

@spalladino again, I think that trying a vary sparing touch of colour would be nice. It feels a little boring to me. Considering purple is crystal's colour on github, and one that I associate with crystal, It would do well to embrace that.