Re: [Snowy] Design Concept of Snowy/Tomboy Online

[Sandy Armstrong <sanfordarmstrong gmail com>]

On Sat, Nov 7, 2009 at 7:35 AM, Manuel Holzleitner
<manuelh pub googlemail com> wrote:
> 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.
> Recently, I've taken the time to push some pixels around and I've ended up
> with three mockups which you can find
> here: http://manuel-uewwy.posterous.com/mockups-for-tomboy-snowy-tomboy-online

Umm, these are just amazing, Manuel!

> 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.

Yes, unified design ftw.

> 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.

For what it's worth, I am not too concerned about having a great
homepage for Snowy at this time.  Nevertheless, your mockup is great.

> 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.

Yeah, I am really loving the Tomboy Online and Snowy logos.  They're
cute as hell.

> 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.

Good point.

> 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.

Love it!

> 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/.

As I've said, I would love to see a revamp of that site and its
design, and I think making it consistent with Tomboy Online is a great
idea.

> 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.

I do like the way your proposed Tomboy logo ties into the new Tomboy
Online and Snowy logos, but I'm not convinced we need a new logo for
Tomboy at this time.  Maybe I'm just used to the giant version of the
existing icon, though, which we currently use as our 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.
> - The fonts used in the Mockups are Arial, Harabara
> (http://www.dafont.com/harabara.font) and Gill Sans.
> 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 ;)

Do you have any interest in doing the HTML/CSS work to bring these
mockups to life?

> 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.

I did see that, and I really like the clean look.  Viewing/editing
multiple notes at once makes a lot of sense, though I suspect with our
limited development resources it might be better for us to stick to
one note per page for now.  Also, I'm not totally sold on having such
"thick" note list items on the left side.  It looks nice, but I'm not
sure it enhances usability over a simple title list.

The overall look is great, though!

Thanks for the awesome work,
Sandy