Re: New GNOME-Office Web Site

[Charles Goodwin <charlie xwt org>]

On Thu, 2004-02-05 at 22:47, Ryan Pavlik wrote:
> Hello, AbiWord friends, and those of you who I am not acquainted with on 
> the GNOME Office list!

Hello and welcome!

> I have uploaded a mockup of a sort of a "splash image" 
> /theme/marketing/design motif on my Abi web page: 
> http://www.ryand.net/oss/abi . I am excited about this design and the 
> possibilities it brings to the projects.

[Yes I read your explanation]

Problems I consider it to have:

1) Too complicated

   All good logos are simple.  Period.  If it can't be recreated easily
   with a pen and pencil in black and white, it's too complex.  That's a
   golden rule of logos from my logo design handbook.  (Yes, I'm still
   writing it... it's nearly 2 pages long.)

   Also, how would you use this as a 16x16px icon?

2) Too much maintainence

   What happens when an application changes it's logo or we get a new
   application.  It's just too much work to maintain it as a logo.

3) Too graphical

   Where exactly is the content / information going to fit into it?

In short I think it make a nice flash animation but that's very
different to a dynamic, maintainable, community web page.

I'm very glad to see your efforts and contributions and hope that you
take this as constructive criticism.

I invite you to look at (and constructively criticise!) my WIP ideas:
http://www.charlietech.com/goffice/index.html

Forget the logo momentarily as we can swap that in/out at will.

> The GNOME Office acronym, GO, also provides numerous "catchphrase" 
> marketing opportunities, and one of these can be found at the bottom 
> of my mockup. ("GO beyond.")

Very good point and definitely something we should build upon.

> As you may have observed, I am committed to revitalizing the Internet 
> presence and customer vitality of GNOME Office.  I believe that with 
> appropriate, creative, effective design and marketing, the GNOME Office 
> project can grow from a "meta-project" into a vibrant customer and 
> developer community, and the GO brand can become a "household name" in 
> the minds of the project's target customers, as OpenOffice.org, MS 
> Office, and to an extent, KOffice have done.  There is much potential in 
> the collective resources of the GO community. 
> 
> I have even more extensive ideas than those I am able to detail in this 
> message.  They will be posted to the above web site once they have 
> reached an appropriately completed level.
> 
> I would be honored to volunteer to recreate the web page of GNOME 
> Office.  I have received offers for help from the AbiWord list, and have 
> already received a partial SVG version of the Gnumeric logo, in addition 
> to the AbiWord logo that I made.  If project leaders or developers have 
> any ideas as to how I could improve my plans, re-organize the project 
> hierarchy, or even just an SVG logo from the projects, it would be 
> greatly appreciated.

I am glad to read this - somebody with similar ambitions to Dom and Jody
(although they wisely express their ambition in amazing advancements of
their respective projects) and other active GO contributors (which I
hope will one day be including myself).
-- 
- Charlie

The future of the net - www.xwt.org

Charles Goodwin <charlie xwt org>
  Member of the XWT Foundation