[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
On Mon, 24 Mar 2008, Joost Verburg wrote:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Do "LyX" have some sort of "primary" colours? Or some kind of colour
theme? My company spent money on letting a designer come up with a
colour
set, where we should try and use a certain combo of colours... Do
we have
something like that?
In my opinion a color set should be a part of the new design.
Ok, but less easy... now I remember what it was called, she referred
to it as the 'graphial profile'. It involved more than just colours,
also what fonts we should use etc. Anyway, the designer we used
apparantly spent quite a bit of time thinking this through somehow.. I
just wonder if we'll be able to come up with something useful. But
maybe this is were Andrei's expertise comes into play?
According to my gf it's non trival, and apparantly related to
"branding"... and we should start with what LyX represents, and what
its core values are.... how are we different from the competition...
sigh, can't we just do development? ;-)
Actually, it's probably a good idea to see what kind of graphial
profiles OO, MS Word, Abi Word and LaTeX have?
/Christian
PS. I tried finding some kind of explanation of what a graphical
profile is... this sounds like the thing I meant. From
http://moonmanstudio.com/graphicalprofile.php
Logo & graphical profile
Any company needs a logo and preferably a graphical profile to make
themselves known to their customers.
Think of the big companies, think of IBM: stripy and blue, McDonalds:
M and yellow. They are graphical profiles that helps give them an
image that sticks in customers minds. Not only do they help the
business stand out, but it also creates a reputation. IBM's logo gives
a very traditional feel, serene and solid. It represents something you
can rely on in the marketplace. While the McDonalds logo is dynamic
and fun, inviting you to a feel-good experience.
A graphical profile spans logo, colours, business cards, stationeries,
and a range of supplies for commercial purposes.
Mostly, for the project like LyX, I believe that graphical profile
should be just a palette of colors and the logo. The only additional
thing we could do is a custom 'mathy' font face, incorporating some
characters used in math formulas, but that'd take more time than I have
at the moment to spend on this, I would say that this could take quite a
bit of effort to do well. In case of a company like IBM, the same color
scheme and custom fonts are used for print ads, booklets, letter forms,
tv ads, billboards, splash screen in programs, website, intranet, signs
in front of buildings, space design on trade shows and I'm probably
forgetting many things here. Note that the UI of programs made by IBM
will use native colors of the platform, for the most part. For them,
maintaining the same graphical profile is more important, firstly,
because use in each instance will reinforce impact of the design in all
other instances, and secondly, because they can manage enough
advertising saturation that the design is imprinted in visual memory and
is not seen as 'blue logo design with stripes' but immediately as 'ibm
design'. For LyX, I would say, it's more important to have a logo and
template that look nice and pleasing to the eye. There will probably be
many other sites that use similar color scheme, unless we do bright
yellow on orange design, which is bad for other reasons. So, a casual
user or someone entirely new won't think 'of course that's LyX color
profile', but instead will think 'this design is nice' or 'this design
isn't very nice' where the first reaction is preferable. People will
remember the Platypus, though, but we already have that. So, to sum up,
we should have a color scheme that will be shared between site template
and splash screen, and probably use a standard font face like Verdana or
something similar for now, and have the Platypus as the main
recognizable identifier of all things LyX. -andrei
--
-ak
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