FreeBSD's Visual Identity: Outdated?
Nikolas Britton
freebsd at nbritton.org
Thu Dec 23 20:46:28 PST 2004
>>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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