Hi,
I really like the idea of Snowy and Tomboy Online and I appreciate the work you have done so far. I thought this is a good time to start contributing to the Snowy/Tomboy project. To make things clear I study Applied Computer Science and seriously I'm not a designer. But I thought about how a design concept of Tomboy Online and/or Snowy could look like in the end.
Let me describe some of my ideas...
Tomboy Mockup
In general, I've tried to remove as much clutter as possible according to the philosophy of Tomboy. I think this is a big advantage of Tomboy and should be reflected by the design of all Tomboy sites.
There was already the idea that Snowy as the django instance and Tomboy Online as the hosted service should get two different logos. So I've made two mockups for Tomboy Online and for a Snowy page.
The logo of Tomboy Online shows two poles with notes attached to the wires. If you see the poles as telegraphy poles there is really no doubt that your notes are "on line". But you can also see them as electricity poles which expresses that Tomboy Online is powerful, of course.
Each mockup also shows a video panel on the first page. This is according to the Blank Slate UI Pattern (
http://ui-patterns.com/pattern/BlankSlate) and should give users an impression on how easy it is to making use of the Tomboy technology.
Snowy Mockup
The Snowy Mockup shows the site where you can download the Snowy instance to set up your own Tomboy Online service. You can expect that the users which accesses the site are more the technical kind of guys. Therefore, the screen cast on the page could show how you can set up your own Snowy instance.
Obviously, the Snowy Logo is not that much different from the Tomboy Online logo. The Logo shows the poles without the wires. This should express the Do It Yourself character of Snowy, so that you just have to wire it up. Snowy (the little dog) is helping you to set it up very easily. And just because of the name there is snow on top of the poles.
Tomboy Homepage Mockup
To end up with a consistent design for all Tomboy related sites we might also have to update the design of
http://projects.gnome.org/tomboy/. Therefore I've also made a mockup and logo for this page.
The Logo here is a note posted on a energy-efficient bulb. The idea behind that is, that Tomboy can make you more efficient and productive and it's all about expressing the slogan "Powerful ideas..." right within the logo. Because of the poles in the TO/Snowy logo you might also see a relationship between the TO/Snowy logo and the Tomboy logo.
Resources
- To put up the mockups and to design the logos I've used Adobe Fireworks. So, the logos aren't plain vector graphics, yet. But of course, I can hand over the editable Fireworks files.
Don't hesitate to share your opinion, ideas and doubts on this stuff. So what do you think? We might be able to iterate over the mockups and end up with a suitable design concept. At least, we could take this as an input for real designers ;)
Regards,
Manuel
PS: I've also some ideas on the "Viewing and Editing Notes" view of Snowy which I may sketch out further. You might find a little preview in the Tomboy Online mockup.
