Our current website works for our own personal use, but it doesn’t quite have that proverbial hook to draw in attention. It’s hard to navigate; it took me a couple of hours just to navigate the website to get to where I wanted to go. If all of our marketing efforts point potential members to the site, they might be deterred by it’s current state. So I asked around and the suggestion of a hackathon came up. So on Wednesday August 6, 2014, we will have a Hackathon around 5pm (although I should be here sooner than that). Anyone can come, but special shout-out for any web programmers, web designers, or graphic designers. The goal is to de-clutter the site, reorganize, polish it up nice and pretty, and make it presentable to anyone coming to our website. Check out other hackerspace websites for inspiration. Hopefully this will be a big step in moving the hive forward.
That’s all from me for now. If you have any questions, feel free to message me
A solid, and consistent branding for the hive - this is an absolutely WONDERFUL idea.
Over the years I have done many graphic/artistic things for the hive. I’ve tried to do consistent branding throughout the work I have done: redoing the logo to a clean reusable image, the laser mural, the banner, the lounge and pillows, the RFID card design, among many other things. I have a great base of hive themed images in my repertoire already. (I’ve also been wanting to upload to these graphics onto our image page for general use. The site doesn’t accept the correct filetype yet, but that will be remedied very very soon).
Additionally, I’ve professionally managed the marketing campaigns and done the graphic design of several new and existing collegiate programs for the last year and a half.
TL:DR - I’ve been doing artistic work for the hive for a long time. I did graphic design for my job for the last year and a half. I love designing and I would LOVE to be part of this as well. Count me in!
I really think this is a great idea and I appreciate you taking the initiative to go ahead and do it! I may not be able to help much but I'd like to be a part of watching it happen!
Do you have any specific ideas using template(s) or is this going to be a from the ground up?
Also, as a shout out to all the powers that be, we should make this official and provide food to the programming team. I'll bring it up again Tuesday night at the meeting.
I’m not much of a designer or Web developer myself either, but I’ll try to help in anyway I can. I was talking to Shadoxx about it, and he was talking about setting up a dummy server (?) for people to use. We were talking
about redesigning it from the ground up, which I think would be better (although if we can agree on a great template to use, I wouldn’t be opposed to it). I was going to bring it up at the Tuesday meeting to boost the
signal, but you are more than welcome to bring it up =). I’m also inviting non-hive members who might be interested, the project might also bring a few more memberships =P.
From what little I gathered in passing conversation, this was intended to be a whiteboarding kickoff session to discuss requirements and site design, rather than a dive straight into the deep end of tool selection and back-end programming.
While I don’t expect much will be needed at this early stage, I’ll show up Wednesday evening to assist with any systems support that may be necessary. (development virtual servers, LAMP related snark, etc)
The plan that I laid out after some initial conversation yesterday was to brainstorm on some designs for the new look of the site. Personally I’d like to model it after our brochures since Joseph did such a good job on them. It would really give us that unified look. Wednesday would be mostly a design brainstorming session, and after we have a design we all like, I was going to code a few skeleton pages. From there we can decide what language/framework we’re going to use and start getting some of the logic done.
Couldn’t make it out tonight, due to mis-planning the evening (which is a nice way of saying “I forgot.”) and the fact that I haven’t yet installed new headlights in my car.
I will post what progress I make later tonight in this thread.
I am working on the banner for the Makerfair right now. I want to send it on to the printers before the end of their business day (in an hour or two). I was wondering what fonts you guys are using for the website/pamphlets that got printed. I tried to figure it out from here, but had no luck.
i picked a really nice font to use for this, but I wanted to try the fonts you guys already used as well. If I don’t get a reply in time I will just send the banner with the font I chose.
Will you send what the banner looks like to the list when it is designed marcus? It would be great if hive stuff looked consistent across all of the different things we have.
Here is a much more updated and polished version of the first banner made last year. This is what I am sending to the printers, because it is getting close to closing time.
If anyone needs help making their signs/stuffs look similar to the designs, just let me know! Always happy to help
Last year I just had “learn to solder” printed across 6 or 7 sheets of paper, this year I was going to step all the way up to having it on one continuous piece of paper.
I had not intended to screw it up with my poor design skills by adding anything else. I welcome any other designs.
Oh dear, I didn’t see this yesterday, so this is probably too late.
The fonts used in the pamphlets and for the website redesign are Exo 2 for the headers and Open Sans for the body. They’re both available on Google Fonts.
