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Date:      Thu, 23 Dec 2004 22:46:14 -0600
From:      Nikolas Britton <freebsd@nbritton.org>
To:        Paul Richards <paul@originative.co.uk>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: FreeBSD's Visual Identity: Outdated?
Message-ID:  <41CB9F16.1010405@nbritton.org>
In-Reply-To: <20041223133440.GC786@myrddin.originative.co.uk>
References:  <20041223112731.GA32750@ninja.terrabionic.com> <89b41e4704122303546aaa8d83@mail.gmail.com> <20041223133440.GC786@myrddin.originative.co.uk>

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>>From a business perspective we look amateurish.
>  
>
I REALLY REALLY agree with this point, from the prospective of an 
outsider the website and "Image" conveys a real lack of professionalism, 
which is not true.

I'm looking at the start page for FreeBSD right now and here are the 
things I do not like about it (please don't be offended if I step on 
toe's and ego's, I am only trying to better FreeBSD):

1. The "FreeBSD" logo is crap, not beastie (he's a keeper!!!, I'll hunt 
you down and do bad things to you if you take him away!), Just the black 
wannabe (and badly done) 3D effect "FreeBSD" part, really, I hate it. 
Redo the whole logo in photoshop with a bold, antialiased modern web 
font: (Arial, Helvetica, Verdana, Century Gothic, etc.) and forget the 
whole 3D effect as that is so 90s. Generally all of your logo designs 
are unprofessional (the logos at the bottom of the page: FreeBSD MALL, 
UseNix, Daemon News, and Powered by FreeBSD for example)

2. I cringe when I see Times New Roman, again redo the whole site with a 
modern web font: Arial, Helvetica, Verdana, Etc. (ever here of Cascading 
Style Sheets?)

3. The color scheme is not "complementary" anyone who has been to art 
school or taken design classes will know what I talking about, read up 
about basic color theory here: 
http://www.color-wheel-pro.com/color-theory-basics.html (again, ever 
here of Cascading Style Sheets??)

4. I like the Beastie logo on the boot loader screen but ASCII art is 
unprofessional... It would be better if you made the color ASCII beastie 
the default.

I have no real issues with the layout of the site and it would be nice 
if the installer was more user friendly but I am content with the way it 
is, maybe you should change the color scheme of the installer to match 
the website?

Here are some example sites:
http://m0n0.ch/wall/screens/system.png
http://www.mozilla.org/
http://www.horde.org/logos/
http://www.xfce.org/
http://www.gnome.org/
http://www.gimp.org/
http://www.php.net/
http://freebsd.kde.org/
http://www.google.com/
http://www.apache.org/
http://www.adobe.com/
http://www.openoffice.org/
http://www.sun.com/
http://www.suse.com/
http://www.novell.com/
http://www.ibm.com/
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/
http://www.mysql.com/
http://cocoon.apache.org/
http://www.w3.org/
http://www.penguincomputing.com/

FreeBSD is badly in need of a PR/Design/Marketing department.



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