Hello and welcome back to the Ruby-Lang redesign blog. Our team is ecstatic about revealing our newest design. I think you’re going to be blown away by how far the design has come. Our team would like to see this design happen as quickly as possible. We could really use your help fostering deep personal love for this new look. I’m dying to see what Ruby No Kai and Matz will say.

This design is largely the work of John W. Long. The rest of us jotted some notes and bounced ideas around, but he pulled it off. (Now on version 10.1!)

We focused our effort on combining the two Round One designs, extracting the elements that you responded to positively. Namely:

• John’s Ruby emblem. You guys were bonkers over this. The gem gives the site an artistic presence, a sparkle. Many of the logos we’ve toyed with made the site a bit too corporate or organizational. Ruby is expressive and I think the emblem conveys that.
• Michel’s code sample and introduction. The hottest request from Round One was to incorporate the leading code sample into John’s design. We experimented with irb prompts and a console with window borders, but it only complicated the appearance.
• Get Started, Explore, Participate. Both Round One designs had permutations of this triple-threat community overview. Each section represents an increased involvement in Ruby. Many people will come looking for introductory texts. What happens when they are finished with the introduction? Where to next? They scroll down to the next set of links and face a broader knowledge base.
• Redness. Some said the redness on John’s original design was a bit much, some wanted the site to bleed. A rich red has been moved into the horizontal menus across the top and bottom. This menu remains throughout the site, leaving the content area open to other colors.
• Top Ruby Projects. This was a point of some conflict in the last round. The idea here is to provide an in-road to the RAA, which is housed at Ruby-Lang and is likely the most frequently used part of the current Ruby-Lang. If you’re not keen on the format here, may I ask—do you have an alteration that would still leave this area pertinent to the RAA?

Obviously we’re dealing with a large group of people here and it’s tough to appease everyone. Your opinions matter, believe me, we constantly mined the blog posts below for ideas.

At this point, though, we really need to work on replacing the current site. This summer continues to spell an influx of new users and wider acceptance. With new books and further articles debutting in the next few months, we hope to roll this out quickly.

I’m going to leave you with one more alteration on the above design, which adds some depth and darkness. I’m ga-ga for this one, my friends.

Hi! Welcome to the redesign blog. The Vit-Core team—the four of us working together to build a better Ruby-Lang—have had a great time over the last two weeks. If you happened across this page by accident, we are working to give ruby-lang.org a new face.

And, if you’ve been following closely, I think you’ll agree that we’ve come along way since this.

Our team has been through a dizzying array of designs and today we present our two favorites. Be advised that there are variations of these designs that we are still considering. But these two represent the bounding edges of our work. The designs share some similarities—those are the things we’ve agreed upon. The designs differ in places were we are still experimenting. And there are omissions.

In this blog, each design will receive its own blog post, to allow specific comments. If you have general comments, leave them here in this post. Or head over to the vit-discuss list for more exhaustive commentary.

Here are questions we’d like you to keep in mind (and hopefully answer) in relation to these two designs:

• What logo should we use? Is it important to choose one that would also work embroidered / printed on a T-shirt, or is one that is designed for a computer screen ok?
• What intro text should we use?
• Should we have sample code, or not? If so, what would be a good sample?
• Package management is in flux right now. Should we link any or all of RAA, Rubyforge, RubyGems and RPA?
• Are there any really high priority links or other content that are missing from the site?
• What information on the current Ruby-Lang site do you find yourself coming back for presently?

Thanks to Curt Hibbs for his help and input. And mucking around with the mailing list, o’ course.

This design is the result of two weeks of shaping by John W. Long. Isn’t that such a lovely red Ruby?

This design by Michel Martens has evolved quickly since he started it on Saturday. He has also worked on a number of logos, which are exhibited below the screenshot.