Railstutor Design Revision 3

[curtismchale]

To start I'm calling it revision 3 to match my filenames. There was
one option I didn't show here before.

Here are the new ideas for design after looking at the HTML code
produced from Redmine and looking at Dana's comments.

The logo is still in the works. I have contact the designer of
Railsbridge logo to get the source file and use parts of it to base
the railstutor logo off of and to use the Railsbridge logo on the
site.


Homepage:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/curtismchale/3691771480/

Sitemap Open with modified tab active:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/curtismchale/3691771314/

[Kent Fenwick]

Hey Curtis,

This looks really great!  Sorry that I have been MIA in a while.  I got so behind in my own stuff and school.

And sorry too to Dana :)  Hope I didn't let you down.

This looks awesome!!  Congrats.  I will hit you back privately along with Dana to see if there is anything I can do to help.

Awesome job!

All the best

Kent

--

++
Kent Fenwick
http://blog.ewakened.com
http://twitter.com/kentf

[Mike Gunderloy]

On Jul 5, 2009, at 4:22 PM, curtismchale wrote:

>
> Here are the new ideas for design after looking at the HTML code
> produced from Redmine and looking at Dana's comments.

One thing I'd wonder about, given that the site just had a redesign
put up, is whether it's time for another full redesign so soon. I'd
think that it makes more sense to rework things as an evolution of the
current design - ie, same colors, same info, perhaps a different
layout - and pull in the common links bar. Just my two cents worth.

Mike

[curtismchale]

I suppose that is fine to rework it but I would be a bit miffed that I
started working on a design a number of weeks ago (yes I was slow)
that didn't get adopted. I did take the current content layout for the
homepage into account as I made the modifications so I suppose this
could be viewed as an evolution.

[curtismchale]

So does the conversation end here? Are we moving forward with this?
Shall I do another revision?

I have the logo for Railsbridge now to incorporate and to use as a
base for the Railstutor site. Shall I move forward on this?

[Dana Jones]

Speaking for myself, here. Given that we just launched a new design
less than two weeks ago, I'm really not all that keen on chasing
around a totally new design at this point. I'd really rather we
invested the time in delivering content or features than more pretty.

Dana

[Douglas Campos]

we could use this layout on bookclub app, what do you all think?

--
Douglas Campos
Theros Consulting
+55 11 7626 5959
+55 11 3020 8168

[Miles K. Forrest]

Seems to me that there's been some confusion here. I thought Curtis was going to do the redesign on Rails Tutor.  Did someone else do one before he finished?

  Miles

[Douglas Campos]

yeah, the actual site layout isn't the one made by curtis.

[Eric Davis]

Miles K. Forrest wrote:
> Seems to me that there's been some confusion here. I thought Curtis was
> going to do the redesign on Rails Tutor. Did someone else do one before
> he finished?

(Dana: Correct me if I'm wrong but this is what I think happened.)

Let me see if I can summarize and bring everyone up to speed on what's
going on.

Curtis has been working on a design comp for some time (looks like June
4th). But it's still in the comping stage, the HTML chops of it are not
ready yet.

There was a working session planned for all the website team on June 5th
to get something finished and decided on. In that session, the people
present decided to move forward on installing Redmine at RailsTutor.org
and to get a preliminary design setup so development can start on the
Testing backend. For the design, it was decided to just do something
very basic so we wouldn't have to throw it away once Curtis's design was
ready.

Dana has done some work to migrate the course data from my Redmine over
to RailsTutor.org and also started on a basic skinning. This is the
design that was launched a few weeks ago.

So to tie this all together:

* The current design on railstutor.org is a preliminary design to get
some basic branding elements into Redmine.

* Curtis is working on a redesign that can be incorporated into Redmine
once it's chopped and ready to go. From the sounds out it, some more
feedback is still needed before it's ready to chop.

* (Speaking for myself) The main reason the design has stalled is just a
a lack of time. If some volunteers could stand up and work with Curtis
and Dana to hammer out the design concepts, that would be extremely useful.

* The backend for the Testing app still needs to be developed. I'm
assuming it hasn't started because of time constraints. This could
benefit from some volunteer effort also.

Did this help clear up some of the confusion?

--
Eric Davis
Little Stream Software
http://www.LittleStreamSoftware.com

[Dana Jones]

Curtis had volunteered to do a design for the site back in May. He submitted a flickr photo on June 13th (http://www.flickr.com/photos/curtismchale/3622811199/) that showed only the Team page, which we had decided not to go with. I sent feedback on the 15th about his design ( http://groups.google.com/group/railstutor/browse_thread/thread/b608448c60194667 for the entire thread) then didn't hear another word from Curtis via email or IRC or anything until the 30th, after I deployed my own design. 

Curtis then submitted another design proposal ( http://groups.google.com/group/railstutor/browse_thread/thread/ccb29eecf63ab86f ) on the 5th - 6 days after the new site design was live, launched, and announced.

I am in no way thinking that the current design is the permanent one (when is any design ever permanent, anyway) but I do feel that I gave timely feedback on the initial proposal and, getting no response, went ahead with a design that would at least work with Redmine. I do appreciate Curtis' passion in wanting to be involved in this project, but felt that things simply weren't getting done in a timely manner.

For now, I would like to table the discussion of designing/redesigning the site. The core of our work on Rails Tutor - the actual courseware - is still a long, long way from completion. I would really love to see energies focused on that instead.

Dana

[curtismchale]

Okay I'll shelve the design part of railstutor.

On Jul 9, 10:31 am, Dana Jones <djo...@larkfarm.com> wrote:
> Curtis had volunteered to do a design for the site back in May. He  
> submitted a flickr photo on June 13th (http://www.flickr.com/photos/curtismchale/3622811199/
> ) that showed only the Team page, which we had decided not to go with.  

> I sent feedback on the 15th about his design (http://groups.google.com/group/railstutor/browse_thread/thread/b60844...

>   for the entire thread) then didn't hear another word from Curtis via  
> email or IRC or anything until the 30th, after I deployed my own design.
>

> Curtis then submitted another design proposal (http://groups.google.com/group/railstutor/browse_thread/thread/ccb29e...