use Perl

• My 0.02 credits (Score:1)

  by phaylon (6115) <reversethis-{ta.474} {ta} {sr}> on 2009.08.31 9:32 (#70362) Homepage Journal

  First a disclaimer: I haven't yet participated in either the development of Perl 6 directly or any of its marketing efforts.

  A few things that would trouble me as someone who hasn't been in the loop with Perl 6 for a while (I followed a bit closer in the beginning, but lost interest):

  • The colors are way too active. My eyes (or rather: my eye) have to switch focus all the time when I look around on that frontpage. Together with the multicolor butterfly it just seems noisy colored. I'd prefer a more consistent colorscheme, so that if I read the right block, my eyes are at the same time still able to scan the words on the next one. This gives context. There are the traditional schools of color palletes to use in print. Personally, I'd like to pick one ground color, one accentuation color (for design and layout purposes), and use them in two or three shades of brightness when needed. For text, I almost always prefer either (if on dark background) "almost white" or (if on light background) "almost black".
  • There's too much stuff in bold. The information on that page is actually pretty dense, so I think it would benefit from cleaner typesetting. Personally, I prefer using sans-serif for the body of the page, and a font with serifs (like Georgia) for the headings to have a separation.
  • I find the logo itself a bit debatable. I get the playfulness, but I always thought of the Perl 6 movement as "geeky playful" not "hello kitty playful." But that's actual a rather minor point. I think people are put off by it because the site has the logo rather big on its top. It's a bit of a slap in the face. If the top-block would be smaller (and didn't contain that much text), and the logo would shrink too, it would seem much more elegant. This might require the aforementioned consistency in the color schemes with an easier-to-read palette, because if the site is this colorful itself, the logo would figuratively drown if it were smaller.
  • The intro text next to the butterfly should rather sum up the Perl 6 spirit, idea and mission, and not be a call to volunteers who at that point might not even know what Perl 6 is yet. Something like

    Perl 6 is a modern high-level language integrating both experiences from decades of Perl 5 development and recent developments in other languages and comp-sci research.

    Then have a content block concerned with getting in volunteers.

  On the things-I-like list are definitely the layout and the dense information. It is frustrating to have to navigate through multiple levels to find examples and such, so this works out really good.

  I also want to note that I don't find the design bad, Since the layout is clean, things like colorschemes and typesetting depend on the information you want to present. I can imagine many projects for which this design would be perfect, I'm just not sure something technical like a language specification and development effort falls into that category.

  And of course, ++ for doing it in the first place.

  --
  Ordinary morality is for ordinary people. -- Aleister Crowley

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