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Message-ID: <40C28381.1050706@umn.edu>
Date: Sat, 05 Jun 2004 21:37:53 -0500
From: Tony Collen <colle006@umn.edu>
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To: dev@cocoon.apache.org
Subject: Re: Redesigning the Samples
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David Crossley wrote:

> Erk, i do not want to pour water on your efforts, but i was
> already really happy with the original design. The only
> thing that i would have changed would be to make the top
> part of the page be even more compact.

Welp, my personal opinion was that (putting it nicely) the page was 
lacking in the graphic design department. So I did something I thought 
was reasonable.

I see people's arguments about dilluting the Cocoon "brand".  I can 
understand this because I worked in an advertising agency for a few 
years, and many years ago I came very close to going to school for 
Graphic Design rather than Computer Science.

I don't want to jeopardize the Cocoon brand by any means.  I would like 
to express my concern about wanting to have a more professional image. 
Not necessarily more corporate looking, but I think a more polished look 
would greatly help the project, which led to my work.

One problem that I encounter a lot when building web sites and doing 
graphic design for people is that if a design is put in front of 50 
people, you'll get 50 different suggestions as to how to make it better 
or more appealing.  This makes it *very* hard to do something that 
everyone will agree to fully.

I've found a few ways around this situation:

- Ignore them, since you know better than they do (arrogant)
- Try to appease everybody fully (doesn't work)
- Take their suggestions into consideration, but keep working forward 
(useful, practical)
- Try to compromise between what people want and what you think should 
happen (best IMO)

Obviously, I favor the compromise route.  Like I said, the page design 
bugged me enough to do something about it. Now I think we should find 
some sort of a compromise that won't dillute the Cocoon "brand" but try 
to snazz up the pages as much as possible, without pissing people off.

WDYT?

Regards,

Tony, who thought long and hard over the weekend about this message, and 
was originally angry about the poor reaction but got over it since he 
shouldn't take people's reactions as an attack against him personally.

P.S.  The cocoon2.ai Illustrator file in the current CVS won't even open 
in the latest version of Illustrator.  This is bad because if we lose 
this file, we face losing original artwork.