Landing design

[Neketek]

We need to find good examples of the landings to which Martha can refer while she is designing landing for us.

I'm waiting for you suggestions in comments.

[ddnomad]

Ole! Your sexy dd here. Mine take on our website design is to make it nerdish and corporate in the same time. I wanna avoid getting struck when browsing our website straight after freaking out in a terminal for like 10 hours in a row.

References

First of all some references:

• Hashicorp main page - quite a dark pallette. It's official AF while being slightly consolish with a help of vivid colour splashes here and there. The key is cool graphics (vizs/dias) used.
• JetBrains main page - the same story here as above. Dark yet vivid. Some console/code related hints here and there.
• Vagrant landing - quite a different approach. The page itself is quite bright yet extremely contrast. That's dope.
• Nomad landing - that's a fucking win. Dark, crisp and contrasting as hell. Also uses greenish kind of colours (quite similar to our current arachnid logo).

Colours / Pallette

Current arachnid42 colours are what I do like. This green (#07F906) and black are gorgeous. Though I understand that design usually might take more then two colours and these two might be not the best choice for attracting clients (they might get blinded by this acid shit).

My take is to use a neat pallette by one random guy called base 16. There is a shitload of different variations of this pallette so we might end up with a good one for god's sake. You can test them out right in your terminal using this repo.

My pallette:

[Neketek]

@ddnomad I agree, I personally like their landings too, but they are orient them on the developers, and in our situation we should try to attract quite opposite group of people, business mans. Lets see what others can propose. And maybe you have something which is oriented on the simple folks?

[Neketek]

@Dubbinary @jerichofs @vsmysle What you have in mind?

[ddnomad]

@Neketek not exactly. What is our TM? Originally we thought of startup kiddies who wanna their shit done from scratch. In such an occasion we want two things:

1. Distract stupid clients that have no idea what they want to be done (see Robert)
2. Attract those who are looking for a professional developers aka geeks. Tech skilled, nerdish, efficient and obsessed with code AF.

I think we can get a completely niche market with such an approach. We do not want to be a simple galley, do we?

[vsmysle]

@Neketek I will try to figure out what landing pages I like and report here soon.

[ddnomad]

UPDATE

I'm researching any possibilities to get some clients in EU (locally in Eesti or something). In such a way we wan't to orient on local companies. Give me a couple of minutes and I'll dig a lil bit deeper.

[ddnomad]

Eesti Galleys & Co

• Pipedrive - doing a specific product (some kind of CRM) targeting marketing people. Design is average and we have no product to offer thus we can't go the same way.
• Playtech - just no comments
• Cybernetica - doing governmental business. Strongly focused on security, R&D.
• Guardtime - offering their in-house BC-related product. Weird AF shit.

Do you want me to continue? The things is: if we gonna orient on existing galleys the result will be bad. Really bad.

We need to figure our our own approach. My suggestion: go nerdy, attract more engineering people. We will have less problems (clients will be not that tech noobs) and we will have our own TM that is quite different from other companies out there.

Also we might come up with our own product at some point. Then we want to go even nerdier.

[Neketek]

@ddnomad I agree, probably we should stick to nerdy design. This galleys landings look so fucking old that my grand grand pa can call them bayan.

[Neketek]

@ddnomad But they are definitely trying to be modern.

[ddnomad]

@Neketek they are trying to huyak-huyak-i-v-production mostly :dagger:

[vsmysle]

Hola! For refs I found landing pages that I like:

• Terminal - wonderful colour scheme, but I do not like such "boxy" layout
• Prettier - cool layout, background color should be changed to black, font - to bright green
• Runkit - minimalistic as fuck, but prefer green font colour
• Junction

Personally, I agree with @ddnomad that we can stick to green&black main colours and add some pink(?) or purple(?) ones.

[Neketek]

@vsmysle This two are nice ones. https://prettier.io/ and https://hackjunction.com/ . For a long time already I'm seeing interesting tendention when background becomes monochromatic or gradient to make content more noticeable because of the contrast with the background and general design becomes very simplistic which is actually good but requires good design skill to compose into something pretty. About colors, I don't know, guys, there is nothing wrong to have dark colors at the landing, but it's up to designer. Of course we'll discuss and correct the design if needed. Tomorrow I'll discuss general style with Alexander, maybe we'll be able to create main frame of the landing: background, header and so on.

[Neketek]

@ddnomad They are still the clients who we want to attract, but usually having an idea and knowing how to implement it are completely different things. I'm almost 100% positive that startup kiddies are not a lot better than Robert, and there is a thing which makes them even a little worse than him, it is the fact that they think that they know how to do this and probably will try to give very useful "advices" about our part of work) So we'll suffer client related idiotic problems anyway. Of course there are also exceptions from this rule and I will be very glad to find one with a lot of money in the pockets.

P.S.

Didn't see your message in the flow.

[Dubbinary]

Hi, guys! We have already considered with design refs, but I've found some examples which exploded my brain:

• Collectivei - Amazing and very dynamic website, but little confusing to understand how to get control on it.

• Hyperverve - Very cool design but it little punish the eyes.

• DTSI - You can control the eye ^D

• Archiactvr - Design there is suitable for us but more dynamic.

• kikk - Here I like button styles.

• Oculusconnect - Nice background and chart part.

• future.moworks - Cool concept of floating content over fixed background image which changes at time.

[ddnomad]

One More - lukz kul

[ddnomad]

I need current iteration of landing design with a minimal verbose description of types of text/promo-stuff we need to place there.

Without it I doubt I'll come up with anything useful in terms of phrasing.

@Dubbinary @nepanime

[nepanime]

1. Arachnid desktop var.1
2. Arachnid desktop var.2

Above are two layout variants of the design drafts (with dummy text for now).

[ddnomad]

@nepanime that's nice actually. The only thing I would drastically reduce an amount of text content. Given I prepared meaningful description it would take too much reading for a client.

IMO we need more graphical content and fancy vector graphics for a landing. The full-fledged description of our services should go into a separate Services page (or alternatively Our approach page).

What do you think tho?

[Neketek]

@nepanime
I must admit it looks beautiful! I personally prefer this variant, it looks fancy, gradients make everything look fancy :) .

@ddnomad It will be better for @nepanime if you'll provide section names and their contents. Judging from her mock ups, her skill is good enough to accommodate your content without our barbaric attention and intrusion.

[ddnomad]

@neketek okay'i'then. Text content in bulk should be ready in 2-3 days depending on my work load.

@nepanime I'll let you know. Meanwhile I would suggest rework the logo. IMSO it looks clumsy.

[Neketek]

@ddnomad New logo or enhancement of existing?

[ddnomad]

@Neketek I have no sincerest idea. Multiple options and team-wide votes casting should help.

[nepanime]

@ddnomad okay, than I'll think about logo improvements and add more graphics on landing page.

[ddnomad]

@nepanime nice! And yep, as @Neketek said take our barbaric suggestions with a pinch of a salt. Anyway more options ensure all team members will be less dicks during negotiations :dancing_men:

[Neketek]

@ddnomad @nepanime I'm thinking about more "arachnid" logo style, but I'm afraid that a lot of people don't like spiders.

[ddnomad]

@Neketek we don't like people. People don't like arachnids. We do like arachnids. Fuck people.

https://www.reddit.com/r/spiderbro/

[Neketek]

@ddnomad Actually, that's a really good point! I lost my sympathy to most of people a long time ago!