Develop Diaspora* Design and Identity

@rasmusfuhse great! Designs are of course far from being final. I was experiment with some textures, styles are yet to be defined.

One small point: Diaspora currently uses Entypo for icons, and a decision was taken not to move to FontAwesome.

The first stage would seem to be conceptual: what Diaspora is for, and what sort of experience we want people to (be able to) have. From this design ideas will come.

Although it would be good to have a common strand running between the various elements of the project (Diaspora itself, the project site and the wiki) I don’t think the design needs to be completely unified throughout. As long as there is a common ‘feel’, that is enough.

We can use the minimal amount of branding necessary for users to know that they are using parts of one project. We’re not a commercial operation needing to ram home the branding at every opportunity.

If we’re going to change the design of the UI in Diaspora itself (and no reason we shouldn’t), we should allow users to keep the current ‘classic’ design if they want to. I don’t think we should force a change on people unless they want it.

I absolutely agree with your points about (a) accessibility and (b) responsiveness. Ideally, Diaspora should be equally easy to use for people with all levels of (dis)ability and on all devices.

If the Diaspora UI can be made completely responsive, it might be that the mobile version will no longer be needed. But that decision should be made as part of a separate discussion.

It looks as though you’ve made some decisions already (e.g. ‘Foundation will have a warm color palette suitable for discovery’), and it would be good to have some discussion about these things, but your input about them will be valuable.

It would be good to work out a minimum set of criteria for compliance with Diaspora’s design and branding, so that pods which want to customise their look can do so while still recognisably remaining part of the Diaspora ecosystem. I think this is what you address at the end of your proposal. Customisation of the UI of individual pods should, I think, be welcomed and encouraged.

Thanks again for all your valuable work on this.

Hi @goob thanks for taking time on your input!

Please mind anything I say as merely suggestions and not decisions! However, I have strong belief in those.

Didn't know about the FontAwesome thing, I think Entypo is pretty much the same... as long as they are vectorial and free, have no special preference. Of course Diaspora* could have its own set, but that will be another phase, since it's much more work.

Thanks again!

Oh, two things which I have been wanting to redesign for a while, but haven't had the energy/expertise:

• the default landing page (boring and unwelcoming);
• the default sign-up page (uses the 'beta' design concept which got ditched a couple of years ago).

If you'd like to help me also with those, I'd appreciate it.

@goob of course! Also, we should definitely need to build a proper list of things that are in need of some design.

@Pablo: Would it be possible to see a mockup of your ideas for the default, light daspora design? The one that is linked from your proposal is a bit vague as it builds on a background image and a dark header with completely new icons, and personally I find it hard to see where you're heading exactly :)

I have by the way been working on some icons in a slow pace, tinkering possibilities to symbolize pods, users, notifications and so on. I'm pretty sure we could come up with our own personal and communicative iconset in the future, and maybe make use of svg as delivery format instead of converting all icons to an iconmap. Vector graphics are getting better support in browsers all the time, and would work out better on a responsive site as the dimensions don't affect file size. This is an off-topic discussion though, sorry for that ;)

Hi! The UI design for that part is just an attempt for making D* look better without even changing the layout that much, using the current one with just some CSS tweaks.

So, not much innovation there, think of it as a first iteration of a progressive enhancement approach; much more could be done by actually freeing the layout, but I wanted to be as realistic as possible with the current resources.

Background image is just a sample of how some basic customization that could enrich D* experience with little effort.

Having an icon set would be great!, we can really nail it doing some basic user testing to check if the metaphors match the actions.

(I meant: "some basic customization LIKE that")

Just to see that I understood correctly. Is the plan here to change the design to reflect what is proposed in the mock-ups?

Not exactly, the mockups are just an attempt to show the potential impact that a redesign could have. The plan is to open the process (it's explained on the proposal).

However, I have to mention that I put some serious thought into it, and that design reflects my ideas on what it should be like. If you go outside and look for another designer, he/she will come up with something totally different (probably). And of course it has my style on it, as it will with any other designer.

As for the diaspora* design, I explained in a previous comment:

The UI design for that part is just an attempt for making D* look better without even changing the layout that much, using the current one with just some CSS tweaks.

So, not much innovation there, think of it as a first iteration of a progressive enhancement approach; much more could be done by actually freeing the layout, but I wanted to be as realistic as possible with the current resources.