Penguicon 2012 Web Design

[nemorathwald]

I spent the other day making this. Thoughts, creative ideas, and new passive-aggressive things for the computer to say, are welcome in the comments.

Comments

[crywolf.livejournal.com]

Things seem to blend together too well with that font and layout. 2012 stands out, but it took me a little while to find the days.

I also won't say anything about the front page being an LJ feed, since I'm sure that will change for the new website.

[matt-arnold.livejournal.com]

Will it? I don't know what exactly the new CMS can accomodate. I do know I want blog posts to appear both on the homepage and an LJ feed. Which direction that travels is not important to me.

[crywolf.livejournal.com]

I'm hoping. The LJ feed gave the 2011 website a rather stale feel.

I'd say it's better to feed from the site to LJ. That probably makes it easier to also feed Facebook, Twitter, or other social media of choice.

[matt-arnold.livejournal.com]

People not changing the website (and in some cases, not being able to change the website) gave the website a stale feel. Take it from me on past experience: making users create a new account on a custom CMS exacerbates that problem.

[cathyr19355.livejournal.com]

It's clever, it's elegant, but it takes a second or to figure out what the site is about. Sorry, but that makes it a bad design in my book.

[matt-arnold.livejournal.com]

I would like to fix this. Can you point in our archives to a Penguicon site that was quicker to figure out what it was about? I could use that to identify the differences and find the problem.

[cathyr19355.livejournal.com]

In my opinion, all of the prior Penguicon sites were easier to figure out at a glance than your proposed 2012 design. I think the best design in terms of comprehensibility of all the Penguicon sites so far was this past year's site for 2010. The second easiest to figure out (though not necessarily the most attractive) was the very first one, for Penguicon 1.0.

[albogdan.livejournal.com]

I read it pretending I didn't know it was for Penguicon, and decided a more likely interpretation would be that it's for some sort of pen based interface conventions: PEN - GUI - CON. It takes some work to interpret the broken lines and the stylized fonts. Looks cool, yes, but lacks in the pure functionality aspect. One thing I do frequently is jump to a convention site just to quickly verify the date and location of the con, and the more instantly it can be read the better for me. So, right now, I like what you're going after, but have to agree that it takes just a bit too much mental gymnastics to interpret the data even if it looks good visually on the screen.

I like the cool penguin-rocket logo. Wonder if that could be made more prominent?

The rest of the design is functional. The background graphics look cool. Some roll-over functionality in the top section could make for fun navigation and interaction.

[matt-arnold.livejournal.com]

That's true. I should put the format in a shape that unsplits the broken words.

Actually, one of the things I ought to have done is included "science fiction and open-source software convention" in the header! It's a lesson I so often try to teach when a con is making an advertisement, but in this instance I forgot it myself!

[zifferent.livejournal.com]

I like it. The splitting up of the words is a bit difficult to parse. Perhaps a mouse-over event that scrolls the words out reintegrated. Also Penguicon and 2012 could be done in a somewhat darker color in the same palette to make it obvious what the site is at a glance.