Finding a QT Designer for Peerunity

Projects
1

So the Peerunity theme competition didn’t exactly work out as planned. For those who weren’t paying attention, most designers refused to work with us without a guarantee of being paid. Speculative work such as design contests just didn’t agree with them. We did however receive 2 entries, which I’ve included below.

So what is the plan now? We were previously talking about doing a 99designs contest, but it seems that is off the table now since the designers don’t actually make us a .qss file. Here is Jordan’s response to me…

[quote=“Jordan Lee”][quote=“Jordan Lee”]I’m just thinking ahead to what happens after we get our winning design. There is still a great deal of work to be done to get the design into a usable state. I’m afraid there is a real risk we will pay $900 for a design and then struggle just as we are now to find someone to convert the design to a .qss stylesheet. It’s not a trivial task. In fact, it is harder to make the stylesheet match a specific design than it is to just create an attractive stylesheet because if you can’t figure out how make something appear the way you want it, you have the liberty to pick another appearance that is technically simple to produce. When I proposed 99designs I was under the mistaken impression that we could get a stylesheet from it. Where that is not true, I am not convinced a photoshop design is progress.

One alternate idea is to identify a number QT clients (for other coins) that are attractive and look in GitHub to identify the developers and approach them directly about working with us.[/quote]

I would say begin searching for a candidate by examining other clients, which will take some time. Meanwhile, let the contest expire. Maybe we will get lucky and someone will submit an excellent design before the 7th. If not, we will then be in a position to guarantee payment to someone who had created a good design in another client.[/quote]

So I let the contest expire. These were the only 2 submissions we got, which I think need significant improvement if we were to use either style…

So today I started going through the qt clients for all the major coins. I went down the list on coinmarketcap. The problem I found is that about 90% of coins seem to use the standard gray, which is pretty pathetic if you ask me. River gave me this link confirming what I was seeing. Check it out. It turns out that wallet design and development is a wide open field with barely any serious competition as of yet. We could really make some progress here with Peerunity…

http://coinjoint.info/arent-coins-focusing-wallet-development-innovation/

So I got down to about coin 20 and I started skipping around because I was getting disappointed with what I was finding. I finally just stopped because I wasn’t finding anything else worth looking at. Here are the wallets I did find that had a specific design…

[size=18pt]Mastercoin:[/size]

[size=18pt]Megacoin:[/size]

[size=18pt]Worldcoin:[/size]

The Megacoin and Worldcoin wallets aren’t exactly my favorites, but I actually really like the Mastercoin wallet. It’s the ONLY one I found that I like and I believe it fits more with the style of Peercoin/Peershares/Peerunity. It’s simple and clean looking. I’m not saying we should copy it, but I think we should probably try and get in touch with the original designer and see what he’d be able to do for us. I’m not exactly sure how to find him though. I imagine you can find out through the Mastercoin Github page right? What do you all think?

2

The second screenshot has some appeal to me. I don’t see pull requests for either entry like I would expect here: https://github.com/peerunity/peerunity/pulls . So I can’t see the rest of the design.

I would like to see screenshots of the other tabs for the second entry. Even if it is not perfect, perhaps we could request some changes so that this entry could be transformed into something we would be happy to use. Who authored it?

3

I think I’m with Jordan here, second screenshot is not too bad, although it is a bit dark for my taste. The wallet should be themed towards the logo colours in my opinion, just to get that consistant look across website, social media and wallet.

What kind of improvements are you thinking? Maybe we need to clarify expectations we have?
There is also the cost and time, it might be more effective to progress the styles we have, instead of starting from scratch again, depending on what level of completeness they are.

4

They are nice…

But is there any reason why you would not prefer to make it easy for interested parties to simply add on functionality/design in an iterative, open-source process?

5

The person who submitted the design posted it here…

http://www.peercointalk.org/index.php?topic=2829.0

He hasn’t been online since May, though there is an email address on his profile we could use to contact him. He didn’t want to make a pull request until the contest was over. I have a couple issues with the second image, though we may be able to work with it as you said.

The logo seems to have an odd placement, plus for the text logo he should be using the light version, rather than the dark version of the text so that it stands out more. It might be better to just remove the text and just have the icon logo, similar to the Mastercoin wallet. The placement they have of their logo in the upper right is also great. The dark background is actually taken from the standard dark backgrounds we use on all our logos…

http://imgur.com/u7n9SyC

I like the style and color of text better in the mastercoin wallet as well as the absence of the bar all the way at the top of the application. I do like the use of the green and the buttons seem shaped with leaf-like curves. Basically, I think I’d be happy with the one that was submitted if it was altered a little bit to bring over some visuals elements from the Mastercoin wallet, but keeping the things that make us different, like the green buttons and the background.

6

i would like something like css style, every user to have its own unique-personal wallet :wink:

7

Well, you need to have some standard branding to start with I think. Achieving agreement on branding across community would be more difficult than herding cats. There will always be a compromise. If this person can deliver this style across the wallet with the suggestions mentioned without a lot of effort we should let them do that and reward them accordingly. Once we have a reference stylesheet and template for peerunity, we can open up to have people adding or replacing it with their own suggestions assuming they compile it themselves.

It would be good to understand where this is at as Jordan already suggested. Posting in original thread where screenshots were posted might trigger the author to come along and provide the information we are after.

Just my 0.02 PPC

8

My personal opinion, but I’d rather see a well-designed mockup, that we then could use as a base of reference and try to match it as best we could using Qt.

Nxt, by far, has the best looking wallet right now. It’s probably because they aren’t using the default wallet, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t coerce the design of the Qt wallet in a similar direction.

Nothing I’ve seen, so far, jumps out at me and says, “this is the direction we want to go in.”

9

[quote=“Ben, post:8, topic:2494”]My personal opinion, but I’d rather see a well-designed mockup, that we then could use as a base of reference and try to match it as best we could using Qt.

Nxt, by far, has the best looking wallet right now. It’s probably because they aren’t using the default wallet, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t coerce the design of the Qt wallet in a similar direction.

Nothing I’ve seen, so far, jumps out at me and says, “this is the direction we want to go in.”[/quote]
I don’t think there is an issue creating a design even I could make a mock-up, the issue is to get it implemented at a decent cost and a timeframe which matches v0.2 release. Designers are typically not hindered by technological barriers.

10

Alright guys, after our little discussion here, I spent the next 7 hours doing some image design work (I’m slow and do 90% of everything in Paint.) I decided to take the light and dark versions that were submitted above and merge them. I also took some visuals from the Mastercoin wallet in the form of the font and color used for the top and bottom portions. The font used is Segoe UI. I removed the top bar and added the Peerunity logo in the upper left corner. The only 2 things I couldn’t do because I was using paint was add in the sending/receiving symbols that go toward the left of the recent transactions and I couldn’t change the font on the “Recent Transactions” text, because it was covered by the green box.

I personally love it and tried to make it as similar as possible to the Peercoin subreddit theme by combining light, dark and green colors. If you guys like it, I could track down the guy who made the original 2 designs and have him work on this. Just let me know…

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y17/Sentinelrv/PeerunityCustomTheme2.png~original

11

Nice Paint job I would say. I think this is a decent theme to start with.

Just to give you some personal feedback:
I’m missing the sparkle a bit though. The logo is great but maybe use the gold a bit more. Just as a touch. There is so much empty grey. Maybe a literally a small sparkle on receive coins tab. Not entirely sure though. Maybe just the text “Your Peercoin wallet” or “Peerunity, the community wallet” or something like that

Also the text in the message area at the bottom should be either green or white (or Gold?). I think it is too dark for something which is only used for important messages.

Just my 0.02 PPC

12

I added some gold on the outside and inside borders and lightened up the warning text in the lower left corner. Does this look better? Also, I want to try experimenting with adding the Peerunity text logo on the overview page, but I won’t have time to do that until late, bot sure if it will fit either…

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y17/Sentinelrv/Other-Images/PeerunityCustomTheme4.png~original

13

I like it, very nice and classy.

Question is now whether this can be done in QT.

14

It might be hard to see the gold border, so here is a version over a darker background. Just make it bigger to see the whole thing…

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y17/Sentinelrv/PeerunityCustomThemeDesktop.png~original

15

[quote=“Cybnate, post:13, topic:2494”]I like it, very nice and classy.

Question is now whether this can be done in QT.[/quote]

I want to wait for comments from Jordan before I attempt trying to contact the original designer about this.

16

I’m going to refrain from comment about specific visual elements. There are people here who are in a better position to offer a meaningful opinion.

17

I like it but think I might prefer either black or grey on its own rather than both combined, or maybe with some added white/off-white if we want it to look like the subreddit. I’m not a designer though so my opinion doesn’t matter much.

18

I was actually trying to make an all dark version at first, but I stopped working on it because it was looking too similar to Mastercoin’s wallet.

Should I make a new thread and blast it around social media to try and get some kind of consensus?

19

[quote=“Sentinelrv, post:5, topic:2494”]The person who submitted the design posted it here…

http://www.peercointalk.org/index.php?topic=2829.0

He hasn’t been online since May, though there is an email address on his profile we could use to contact him. He didn’t want to make a pull request until the contest was over. I have a couple issues with the second image, though we may be able to work with it as you said.

The logo seems to have an odd placement, plus for the text logo he should be using the light version, rather than the dark version of the text so that it stands out more. It might be better to just remove the text and just have the icon logo, similar to the Mastercoin wallet. The placement they have of their logo in the upper right is also great. The dark background is actually taken from the standard dark backgrounds we use on all our logos…

http://imgur.com/u7n9SyC

I like the style and color of text better in the mastercoin wallet as well as the absence of the bar all the way at the top of the application. I do like the use of the green and the buttons seem shaped with leaf-like curves. Basically, I think I’d be happy with the one that was submitted if it was altered a little bit to bring over some visuals elements from the Mastercoin wallet, but keeping the things that make us different, like the green buttons and the background.[/quote]

hi,

actually its was place holder for logo with text light version, i assuming that both version have same height and width, and yes size does matter because we need to scale it down without broke image propotion. at the time i writing it, i cant find the light version, so i using whatever available at moment. logo placement either left side or right side, i like them both.

i also considering using logo only, like this

PLEASE IGNORE WINDOWS BORDERS, its Linux KDE windows border.