Identity: use a white "diaspora*" wordmark instead of the black star logo in the navbar

Features and Ideas
21

This is crazy, are we having the same discussion again?

I’m totally fine with having the logo on the navbar all the time. As I’m with Loomio’s logo right now. And as pretty much ALL the sites we use everyday has. Github, Twitter, Stackoverflow, Loomio, your e-mail, pretty much every damn site.

As for podmins, this is an open source project, so podmins can do pretty much whatever they please with everything.

I did some research, and as you may imagine, there is no specific data about using a logo on the top navbar regarding branding, may be a nice subject for a blog post.

But as you can tell by many posts, by the practices of many framework, and by almost every freaking web site on the world, putting your logo on the navbar is almost a standard web practice. It’s a great place to have a logo to take you home, which is the common practice.

Some will say: “Yeah, but Diaspora is different”. Sure, but you can be different and also wrong, and there are also, different moments where to be different. Be different but smart, build trust on your new users, put a freaking logo on the top navigation bar as everyone does.

Assumptions are bad for UX, but you can safely assume that many internet users are familiar with navbar logos.

I seriously think that Diaspora, on this stage, has to grow as a brand, it needs to build trust around its mark, it’s logo, it’s pods, everything.

Branding grows into the user, it’s not a bad concept, it can be used to convey good things, such as trust. If you are doing something good, why not promote it with a brand?

I really like this project, I would love to help giving Diaspora a new UI and see people sharing screenshots and screencasts with the logo on it.

22

No need to rant, most of us recognized that if you read the proposal and the votes carefully :wink:

23

I know, but it just freaks me out. I think this “sub proposal” distorts the original one where a decision was already been made.

Maybe we should take this poll to Diaspora, where the actual Diaspora users will decide. Maybe they will prove me totally wrong.

24

Maybe it’s democracy that freaks you out? People think different; some think long-term, some think short-term. Some like symbolic design, some like informative and everything-on-the-plate design. :slight_smile:

And pretty much every “damn” site you take as an example is a site that is strongly coupled with the domain name specific branding. Take git, torrents or mail as an example instead ;p

25

Democracy freaks me out? You’re being condescending.

I insist:

Maybe we should take this poll to Diaspora, where the actual Diaspora users will decide. Maybe they will prove me totally wrong.

26

@hola I don’t think d* supports polls very well - Loomio does a good job and people here are clearly backing the original proposal by you :slight_smile:

Sure, we can ask for feedback on d* - and actually if you could write a post as we already agreed, we can share that post. But for voting, we’ve agreed to use Loomio. d* polls just don’t federate well enough yet…

There is no need to freak out if someone disagrees. That is just how the world works :stuck_out_tongue:

27

@goob is there a particular reason you set your proposal for a very long month period - which is unusually long for proposals?

28

I don’t expect everybody to agree, but I fear that if it take two months (or more) to apply a fairly common design practice, it will take forever to build a new design… :S

29

Yeah, I think the current vote length is more like stalling the original outcome than actually needed. @goob, mind if I shorten this? :slight_smile:

30

Will be get the blood to the river for a fucking logo?, yes, my opinion is contrary to change, two reasons for that:

  1. is common and useful the existence of a complete logo and one summary logo, we have Diaspora *, complete logo “Diaspora " and summarized logo "”

  2. I like the minimalism, and this is one of the facotres I like about Diaspora* So it seems like a good idea to keep as Asterisk logo wen at least we are logged.

@hola
I do not think a case can not be discussed again by being voted before, and in this case there is an intelligent the first proposal that has come out favorably in the previous vote counter,

dialogue and consensus are tools much more useful than votings if we want a strong future,

as I said, is better does not to blood river, so I just voted no to the above and if this and have not locked, almost never do, but please never sey"This was already decided before" that the non-reviewable decisions are not democratic.

Sorry about my English.

31

That blood river you talk about is what discourages me.

I don’t know where all this “democracy” thing is coming from, I made a proposal as everyone does, I didn’t even made a pull request, and I’m not even blocking this new vote, I just been passionate expressing my feelings, but I also took the time to deeply explain my reasoning.

Anyway, I’ll just move on from this and try to help with other stuff (begin porting to BS3 maybe), there is a lot of work to do on the UI side.

32

@hola

putting your logo on the navbar is almost a standard web practice.

Diaspora has always had its logo (an asterisk) in the header bar - just not the full name of the project.

I think this “sub proposal” distorts the original one where a decision was already been made.

I disagree. You allowed no time for discussion, for people to share views, before you opened your proposal, so there was no chance for anyone to suggest making the proposal on logged-out browsing for the first proposal. I believe the way you went about opening the proposal skewed the outcome, and that it’s useful to have this vote on this specific issue.

@jasonrobinson

mind if I shorten this? :slight_smile:

Absolutely - I thought a longish time was good because this has proved to be a controversial point and there hadn’t been discussion time allowed before the first proposal. If you think it’s too long, shorten it by all means.

33

@goob Hey, sorry for going straight to creating a proposal, my bad. I don’t know how much time is needed for this things, but I also (wrongly) assumed it was going to be a quick discussion, I honestly think this is for the benefit of the project, and I thought this was a no brainer, and everybody would feel more or less the same way. I was clearly mistaken. I’m actually still surprised by the resistance on using the full logo.

Diaspora has always had its logo (an asterisk) in the header bar - just not the full name of the project.

I think this is like discussing semantics already. Of course the logo was always there, but it’s near to invisible. Also, that is not the logo, that’s the isotype, the logotype is the one with the word on it.

Anyway, I understand the reasoning behind the “no logo” supporters, but I just think that this is going to be better for Diaspora’s growth on the current stage it is.

P.S.: for anyone interested in logotype naming conventions, check http://quaxar.com/blog-new/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Branding-1.png

34

Also, that is not the logo, that’s the isotype, the logotype is the one with the word on it.

Fair point there, and I should have known that, being a word-smith. Let’s say ‘brand mark’.

The ‘invisibility’ is a different issue than using or not using a word.

I think when creating proposals it’s good to break down a proposition into single points – e.g.: making the brand mark white; using the full ‘wordmark’ in the header; using it always or only during logged-out browsing – and making a proposal on each of these. Otherwise it gets complicated and some people end up having to vote against as they can’t agree with the proposal as it stands, even though there are some things in the proposal they do agree with.

Anyway, it seems as though your argument has carried the day. No hard feelings, I hope. This is just something about which I do feel quite strongly.

35

@goob No worries! Let’s see what happens with the next days on the voting, people reading all these arguments may change their mind. In the meantime, I’ll try to help with the final BS2 issues and porting to BS3. We will get back to this later.

What I discovered in the process, is that the branding strategy is not clear and there are different opinions about it.

For instance, I would encourage pods to have their own logo there, writing some recommendations to make their own logo look good on the navbar, and we may find some other totally different placement for Diaspora’s logo to reinforce identity, for example in the footer, with a message like: “Proudly using diaspora* software”, which will be much more discreet.

36

For instance, I would encourage pods to have their own logo there, writing some recommendations to make their own logo look good on the navbar

I agree this is a good approach. In fact, when redesigning the navbar, it would be really useful to code it so that it will cope well with logos of different widths. For instance, one pod might want the full word-mark and another just the asterisk. The navbar might already cope with such differences; I don’t know, but it would be useful to make sure this works well in the future.

37

We already have “Powered by diaspora*” in the footer.

Btw, I think that we really have to find how to move on about Design and UX. We’re stuck when with a few effort, something awesome can be built, check https://diaspora-fr.org/people/6bce2000b8bb013208d62a0000053625 for example.

38

We already have “Powered by diaspora*” in the footer.

That was added by Diaspora Inc. when it was a young start-up, and considering investment from venture capitalists and the like. It doesn’t determine the approach of this community run Free Software project now, four years later. We don’t even have to retain it in the UI - it’s just never been removed yet.

39

We’re stuck when with a few effort, something awesome can be built, check https://diaspora-fr.org/people/6bce2000b8bb013208d62a0000053625 for example.

You could ask that person to contribute to the discussion in Loomio.

40

is someone able to create a pull-request for this?
i think it would be good to have this in the 0.5.0.0 release.