I’ve finished the Web Page Designs! For the page designs, I decided to pretend that I’m working for the Web Design Department of the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Coincidentally, after I had already decided they needed a web design, they had apparently agreed with me. They rolled out an April Fool’s Day Style sheet make over before rolling out the actual new design on the 2nd.
Thought’s on their new design:
Their new design is a well placed attempt to attack some of their design concerns, and problems that certainly face the site. The biggest issue is making navigating an expanse of information more easy and less terrifying to the less technology experienced (those who aren’t already building their own circuits and robots and programs, children). They present a lot of info, which can confuse users.
Their new design has six blocks for navigating, only one of which expands into a sub-menu, which feels crazy unbalanced, especially after you click on some of them and find your self on a landing page with what amounts to a be big sub-menu in the content area below some explanation. I can appreciate offering the explanation for less experienced users. They did get rid of having both a “Help” and “FAQ” link in the navigation, which was something that bothered me about their earlier design.
The colors feel less “Girly Engineer” and more “Elementary Educational”, which is more on point with the identity presented on their about page. This color/vibe change is apparent in the 6 different colored navigation blocks in the navigation bar at the top, and the anti-color versions of the logo which make it look less girly (oddly this is something the tech sector seems to have many issues with as of late, which is part of why I tried to lean into the pink a bit on this one). They also stepped up the homepage with a “Featured Content” slide show, which will certainly help get more kids interested in computer science and engineering.
Overall, good job, but I think some improvement can still be made. They’ve got a lot of information which they’ve already sectioned pretty well, but with as much as they have, a secondary navigation for less important information to the “new user” (a child or a newb) could be implemented quite effectively, and as shown still makes navigation easy. Satisfying both the New and the Super User.
I figured the biggest navigation items involved getting Users set up and computing at the very least, and getting potential Pi owners to Buy A Pi. Access to the community, from years of living in the hacker culture, will ultimately be of much more use to many users than the typical help screen. And Downloads are absolutely necessary.
They had been using a side navigation for recent blog posts, which I thought would allow for some lovely repetitively themed sub-navigation bars for taking the user to specific parts of pages/articles/sub-sections of sections of the site.
As mentioned earlier, I pretended to be in their webdesign department. This means I wanted to keep their already produced content for the most part and try to make their colors and design hit the target. They want it friendly and targeted at kids, so bright colors were a must. Since girls aren’t often targeted for technology and engineering “toys” like this, I decided to lean into the pink from the original site design so it would feel more inviting to the New Female User. I also wanted to keep from alienating the hordes of male users by balancing the pink with some boyish green and some neutral brown and white. I did my best to avoid an Ice Cream sort of feel.
I decided to use a fairly organic feeling but geometrically influenced font for the logo type/home link. The copy type is done in Helvetica Neue, and the titles are done in Gautami.
Samuel A. Swayze 