Future Web Development - Appearance & Visual Style

[quote=“Ben, post:26, topic:2499”][quote=“TheWildHorse, post:25, topic:2499”]I can integrate the google form in peercoin.net, and with that do all of the things you mentioned and it will look much better than it currently looks.

Could you just provide me with more info about the mailchimp newsletter, such as the application link?[/quote]

I’m not sure if there is one yet, but even if there isn’t, it’s pretty straight-forward to set one up.

@Cybnate, @River333, or @Sentinelrv: Do you know if one had ever been created on MailChimp for Peercoin’s mailing list?[/quote]

iheartcryptocoin set up the MailChimp account for us and added me to it. He hasn’t been around lately and I’m not sure if it’s possible for me to add people to the account. I also don’t know exactly what an application link is. Maybe it would be better for me to setup a new account?

@TheWildHorse
i personally would prefer less colour in the icons used. i prefer what you have done with the footer for example which sticks more clearly to a theme. having said that, i am just one person and there are others who are a lot more involved than me that you should probably hear out. thanks for your hard work.

imho, the darkgray background with the peercoin logo and the text in front of it, was never really a fan of it, but it looks okay-ish , only thing that really bothered me was the word “Cheap” in the middle of the screen. If you don’t read the webpage completely (like me ::slight_smile: ) the word cheap stands out, and consciously or subconsciously you remember it, altho it means the same, would rather use “Low Cost”

I think this is a definite improvement over what we have right now, but I think it still needs some work to fit in with the Peercoin color theme. The main colors so far have been white, light gray, a very dark gray, green and gold. Check out our subreddit to see what I mean: http://www.reddit.com/r/peercoin

The dark horizontal backgrounds in your concept image are not gray from what I see. It looks like it’s still using the dark blue from the previous website, which doesn’t really fit with the Peercoin colors. I altered the image a little bit to make those backgrounds more like the dark gray we use. This was just something I threw together real quick to change the background color. It doesn’t have to be this shade. I just wanted to get that blue out of there…

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

A problem I’m seeing though is that I don’t think there’s enough green toward the top half of the website, but then there might be too much at the bottom. Maybe it just appears unbalanced? I’m not sure what you can do to include more green in there. The green buttons help, but there’s not that many toward the top half. What is the font you’re using?

Like it, definitely improvement moving into 2014 :wink:

Agree that color usage is a bit out of balance, but most people will have to scroll anyway and won’t see page as whole. Not a biggie to me, but maybe with those ultra high definition screens becoming more main stream it might become more important. And I think Sentinelrv and I have an ongoing agreement to disagree on usage of colors :wink: I’ll leave it with that.

Still like to see a language selector on top of the page. it doesn’t make sense to have it at the bottom. Maybe just a pull down instead of displaying a list of languages to everyone.

Also the list with exchanges and useful links needs to be added to. I think it should be a complete list. If there are too many we need to refer to separate page via a click for more. There are so many goodies out there that we probably need to setup another thread to get an overview of all of them. it is a shame many of them are very hidden for newbies.

Are there still plans to make the logo more visible and unobstructed?

My only feedback is the two dark grey segments should be different shades even if slightly, that middle section feels a bit disjointed.

A mockup with the middle dark grey segment being a very-light grey would be interesting to see!

Apart from that, I like it.

Pretty good progress. Step above what we have.

Some things

[ul][li]I like the layout, but the color palette is just all over the place. [/li]
[li]Add Miner to the Individual, Merchant, Developer[/li]
[li]We can make the assumption that this isn’t their first cryptocurrency. The top portion should list the innovative features over Bitcoin vs. what a cryptocurrency is.[/li][/ul]

Remember to leave some space for the Peercoin video by Overkillcoin!

That’s ok and understandable. Looking forward to seeing your work. Also, in case you didn’t see it I posted something right above about a newsletter…

[quote=“Sentinelrv, post:21, topic:2499”]@TheWildHorse, I just wanted to make sure you knew about this. In the first post of this thread there is a chat I included between me and Super3. Toward the end we talk about trying to solve an issue.

We want to implement a Peercoin newsletter where people sign up from the front page of peercoin.net. Besides the newsletter, we also have this: http://www.volunpeer.org/. People use that website to fill out a bunch of details in order to become a volunteer. We can then use that information in case we need volunteers for some Peercoin related effort. That is a Google form. The information then gets sent to a Google spreadsheet. I manually take the email addresses entered and put them in our MailChimp account.

The newsletter sign up form should be using our MailChimp account as well, so that everyone needs to confirm it with their email that they wanted to be added to the mailing list. Currently the way our volunpeer mailing list is setup, nobody receives a confirmation email that they wanted to be added, since I move over the addresses manually. They do agree to receiving emails though when filling out the Google form.

I wish I could set this up to be automatic, so I don’t have to transfer any email addresses manually, but we also need the way it’s currently setup, where we gain all this extra information from all the extra fields that need to be filled out. It might not be a big deal though, since the newsletter signups would most likely far outweigh the volunpeer signups, so it might be manageable to keep doing it manually in the future.

What I was thinking was that the Peercoin newsletter signup form be somewhere very visible on the home page of peercoin.net. Once somebody signs up and they confirm their email, they’re taken to a confirmation page which tells them that everything is completed and that they’re officially signed up. But, if they’d like to further involve themselves in the community and become a “Volunpeer,” they’d just need to fill out this additional form. I’m not sure if it should link to volunpeer.org here, or if there is a way to incorporate the volunpeer form into the confirmation page. What do you think about all this?[/quote][/quote]

not bad new layout candidate but it looks cluttered. imho we should focus on the main value and make a simple design emphasizing it. perhaps the idea of “sustainability” is the most important one.

I agree. The bottom of the page is the foundation, “the solid block that the page is resting on”. Right now we have the heavy solid thing, resting on top of a green light thing - I think that’s why it feels unbalanced. Its the opposite thing you want to communicate about a stable coin that is taking the long term view.

I went to art school for two years. I could probably go on and on nag about things all day long. If we’re really lucky, we never finish anything at all. I just added this comment, to show my appreciate of your work by participating with constructive critique. The thing is, you guys are actually doing something here and making progress. And I think you are doing a great job.

The image of the front page linked above is very wide. I cannot see it all on my screen without moving the scroll bars left and right.

Is that the width the end product is intended to be? If so, I do think it needs to be narrowed

I agree. The bottom of the page is the foundation, “the solid block that the page is resting on”. Right now we have the heavy solid thing, resting on top of a green light thing - I think that’s why it feels unbalanced. Its the opposite thing you want to communicate about a stable coin that is taking the long term view.

I went to art school for two years. I could probably go on and on nag about things all day long. If we’re really lucky, we never finish anything at all. I just added this comment, to show my appreciate of your work by participating with constructive critique. The thing is, you guys are actually doing something here and making progress. And I think you are doing a great job.[/quote]

So maybe the bottom of the website should be the dark gray color, while the upper parts use more white, green and gold? That sounds like a more solid foundation according to your comment.

[quote=“RobertLloyd, post:39, topic:2499”]The image of the front page linked above is very wide. I cannot see it all on my screen without moving the scroll bars left and right.

Is that the width the end product is intended to be? If so, I do think it needs to be narrowed[/quote]
This is just an SS from my local testing server, just to save myself the hassle of uploading it to a server. It will be responsive as it is now…

I agree. The bottom of the page is the foundation, “the solid block that the page is resting on”. Right now we have the heavy solid thing, resting on top of a green light thing - I think that’s why it feels unbalanced. Its the opposite thing you want to communicate about a stable coin that is taking the long term view.

I went to art school for two years. I could probably go on and on nag about things all day long. If we’re really lucky, we never finish anything at all. I just added this comment, to show my appreciate of your work by participating with constructive critique. The thing is, you guys are actually doing something here and making progress. And I think you are doing a great job.[/quote]

So maybe the bottom of the website should be the dark gray color, while the upper parts use more white, green and gold? That sounds like a more solid foundation according to your comment.[/quote]

I guess that would be better. I don’t know how it would affect the rest of the design.

I kind of like the http://peershares.net/ design and how the colors of Peershares is reflected in clickable widgets (buttons, links)

In Peercoin we have the yellow thing, which I’m not sure of how to incorporate. Yellow is really difficult to see against something light like white, but yellow on dark grey is another story. Yellow on black, is actually the strongest contrast colors there is. Maybe the design could leverage that fact? (http://media-cache-ec0.pinimg.com/236x/db/e7/24/dbe72446dcb277d8b17bbf0b51203d61.jpg)

Since yellow and black would be really intense (in nature its a warning sign), the green could be used to perhaps smooth things out and bring some freshness to the whole thing. It could end up looking like this if we’re not careful (http://cssmayo.com/content/uploads/2010/09/4.jpg). But it doesn’t have to it could also look more like this (http://www.noupe.com/wp-content/uploads/trans/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/designzillas.jpg).

Oh-no, just as I suspected… if you listen to me you will never be finished because I will never be satisfied. Not with my own designs as well. (That’s why I never got a tattoo)

EDIT: Another example of how to work with grey and yellow: http://fc08.deviantart.net/fs70/f/2010/018/2/2/228c91479f71e50d0c2ce83b82be88e2.jpg and with some white in it as well http://designmodo.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/429.jpg

I will take a look at all this in the morning. I believe the next mockup should be a bit closer to what you are looking for, it is shaping up pretty decently.

I’m not sure I like the yellow in there either. I understand we have gold in our color palette, but that’s usually limited to our logo. The way I envision the website, it should be mostly white and green, with minimal amounts of dark gray added to it, mostly in the footer, maybe even in the header, similar to http://www.peershares.net (Though the page would be longer, so you wouldn’t see as much dark gray). I think the Peercoin logo looks best behind a dark gray background (Rather than white), but there shouldn’t be too much dark gray (I’m starting to agree with Cybnate on the darkness). Like I said, I think it should be mainly white and green, with minimal amounts of dark gray. I’m starting to see the two dark rectangles that cut across the screen as distracting as well.

@TheWildHorse, here is the latest version of the Peerunity theme we’re designing. Maybe it will give you some inspiration. It’s exactly what I’m talking about, mostly a light or white color with green and a minimal amount of dark gray…

The yellow/goldish was only added because it was the only color that somewhat fits with the theme that was eye-popping in that layout, will try to get it removed tho if you wish.

Sentinel, is it possible to split this thread between “Future Web Development - appearance and visual style” and “Future Web Development - content and themes”?

The topic has been split…

Future Web Development - Content & Themes