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I was recently asked to provide help with visual design on the new website for Plone, the powerful and flexible, platform independent, open source content management system that has established itself as an ideal solution for intranets, document management and public websites for organisations as diverse as NASA, Oxfam, eBay, The University of Oxford and Novell.
Most of the web projects I work on for Netsight use Plone as a CMS so it was kind of cool to work on concepts for Plone’s flagship site.
Although some of the elements of my original concepts, shown here, have been lost in translation and the site could maybe do with a few tweaks here and there to resolve some layout inconsistencies, it’s certainly an improvement on what was there before.
I would, however, like to say right here, right now, that I had nothing to do with the twig image used on the homepage! Apparently the powers at be didn’t like the shady looking characters I used as header images.
Anyhow, that’s enough from me; you can read more about the new design here on Plone.org.
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This is the weblog of UK based digital creative, Iain Claridge, serving as a repository for news, views, random ideas, thoughts, obsessions and expressions.
For the lowdown on my design, photographic and consultancy work, visit Iain Claridge Studio.
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Yeah, not all of the redesign went out at once, there’s still work to do. In particular, the sector-specific navigation couldn’t go in until the marketing team has the content ready. I’ll make sure we stay as close to the original vision for the front page as possible once we have the content to match it!
Thanks for your awesome work on this, Iain!
(And the reason the silhouette people were dropped is that it didn’t test very well, people thought it reminded them about domain parking pages, etc :)
The front page imagery will likely change over time, and suggestions are (as always) appreciated.
Oh, and we definitely need to do a “let’s adjust the spacing and colors” session once the dust has settled — I’m not entirely happy with the current state myself, but we needed to get this out.
Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, etc. :)
OK, Alexander…
I can see your point about the silhouette people… but a twig…?! ;)
Twigs are people too! No, wait… ;)
Let’s see if we can come up with some better imagery. If you have any suggestions, I’m all ears. There’s definitely a “phase 2″ to this design after we have cleaned up all the boring things like IE7 CSS bugs, etc. :)
Actually, being a reformed botantist, I like the twig imagery for two reasons:
1) A twig breaking bud is a perfect seasonal image that could easily be rotated out on a quarterly basis. It connotes vigor, freshness, renewal, and, quite frankly, avoids a mercenary stereotype.
2) More importantly, the line of the twig holds the eye in the classic F-shaped pattern that eye tracing studies have found to be commonly employed by site visitors.
I do like your “What can Plone do for you?” section, but it might be better placed in the left-most slot lower on the page. It lets particular classes of site visitors choose their area of interest for a detailed response honed to their particular domain.