Tom wrote:

> Another thing I would improve (as a kind of marketing strategy) is the aesthetics of digitalmars.com. It's very useful but very very very ugly (sorry, just my honest opinion). I see it in almost every thing that has a lot of success. 

Or maybe its that projects that have lots of success decide it's worth the effort to improve their websites.  I don't think you can say there's any causal relationship between the website and the success of the programming language.  Python's old site was pretty ugly and amateurish for a good long time -- until well after Python was a success.

Having nice images, with all kind of colors and stuff
> sells to the sight. 

Good web design != all kinds of colors and stuff :-)

People get attracted to lights and mirrors every
> time. I know that this isn't a trivial task, but it could certainly be done.

I think the (newly redone) Python site is very professional looking:
www.python.org

Ruby's site looks good too:
http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/

PHP is ok, but a little cluttered looking:
http://www.php.net/

Nemerle is a wiki, but it looks pretty nice:
http://nemerle.org/Main_Page

I think one thing is that (255,0,0) red just isn't a good color for a website, period.  It's seen in most of the images on the D site, eg:
http://www.digitalmars.com/d/overview.html.
It's hard on the eyes.  Low saturation colors are nicer to look at.

That said I like the curent D site.  A *touch* of color (preferably not more red) wouldn't hurt in softening the predominantly gray look.  But overall I think it looks fairly professional, except for MS-Paint style images here and there.

--bb

Walter Bright wrote:
> Tom wrote:
>> I know that this isn't a trivial task, but it could certainly be done.
> 
> Actually, in the last go-round on all this, the website is now driven by one style sheet and one big Ddoc template. So, within limits, it shouldn't be too hard to do major global changes.

Here's a slightly touched up version of the happy D guy on overview.html.  Just a little bit-o-gradient to replace the 100% saturated red color.  I tried fixing the lack of antialiasing in the outline but couldn't find any combo of photoshop filters that actually made an improvement.

--bb

Bill Baxter wrote:
> Here's a slightly touched up version of the happy D guy on overview.html.  Just a little bit-o-gradient to replace the 100% saturated red color.  I tried fixing the lack of antialiasing in the outline but couldn't find any combo of photoshop filters that actually made an improvement.

It does look a bit better, but it's 3x larger than the .gif file. I suppose there's no hope for that, though. The only way to fix the antialiasing problem is just to redraw it by tracing it.

Walter Bright wrote:
> Bill Baxter wrote:
>> Here's a slightly touched up version of the happy D guy on overview.html.  Just a little bit-o-gradient to replace the 100% saturated red color.  I tried fixing the lack of antialiasing in the outline but couldn't find any combo of photoshop filters that actually made an improvement.
> 
> It does look a bit better, but it's 3x larger than the .gif file. 

You can certainly convert it back to gif to make it smaller again. Although it only went down by 500Bytes when I tried.

> suppose there's no hope for that, though. The only way to fix the antialiasing problem is just to redraw it by tracing it.

Yeh, I started doing that, but it was taking too long -- lunch break ended. :-)

--bb

Walter Bright wrote:

> It does look a bit better, but it's 3x larger than the .gif file. I suppose there's no hope for that, though. The only way to fix the antialiasing problem is just to redraw it by tracing it.

There is an anti-aliased D guy over at the Wiki4D, under "Logo":

http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?Logo

--anders

clayasaurus wrote:

> Can we can figure out a use for http://d-programming-language.org/ in the scheme of internet marketing as well? Maybe turn it into a community blog like slashdot where D programmers can register for an account, submit stories, and them comment on them?

It would be good if there was such a page for the language in general,
that would have marketing for both Digital Mars/DMD as well as GNU/GDC ?

The current selection of links for GDC just doesn't do it justice...
(http://dgcc.sourceforge.net and the old http://opend.org, and so on)

--anders

Anders F Björklund wrote:
> Walter Bright wrote:
> 
>> It does look a bit better, but it's 3x larger than the .gif file. I suppose there's no hope for that, though. The only way to fix the antialiasing problem is just to redraw it by tracing it.
> 
> There is an anti-aliased D guy over at the Wiki4D, under "Logo":
> 
> http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?Logo

Cool!

Walter Bright wrote:
> Anders F Björklund wrote:
>> Walter Bright wrote:
>>
>>> It does look a bit better, but it's 3x larger than the .gif file. I suppose there's no hope for that, though. The only way to fix the antialiasing problem is just to redraw it by tracing it.
>>
>> There is an anti-aliased D guy over at the Wiki4D, under "Logo":
>>
>> http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?Logo
> 
> Cool!

But he's also filled with #FF0000 red. :-(

And, to me, his lines are a little too perfect.  The wobblyness of the lines on the original gave it a kind of a personal charm.

--bb

Walter Bright wrote:
> Bill Baxter wrote:
>> Here's a slightly touched up version of the happy D guy on overview.html.  Just a little bit-o-gradient to replace the 100% saturated red color.  I tried fixing the lack of antialiasing in the outline but couldn't find any combo of photoshop filters that actually made an improvement.
> 
> It does look a bit better, but it's 3x larger than the .gif file. I suppose there's no hope for that, though. The only way to fix the antialiasing problem is just to redraw it by tracing it.

I just processed it though the Inkscape[1] auto tracer and did some manual cleanups. Some details were lost, but I didn't have time to spend more than 10 minutes on this. zlib-compressed the svg turned out to be less than 6 kb which is approximately 2x the original in size.

The png should be unnecessary as everyone nowadays has svg support in their web browsers, right? ;)

[1] http://www.inkscape.org

Oskar Linde wrote:
> The png should be unnecessary as everyone nowadays has svg support in their web browsers, right? ;)

Nope. The 16K is a little big, can you try it as a jpg?