Bitcoin Unlimited - Visual Identity

[Peter R]

Wow, these are both awesome images! Can the slide show on the homepage scroll through both of these?

Regarding the logo for the home page, now that the "unlimited" is below, would it look better non-italic and a bit smaller? Right now it seems a bit unbalanced to me. I do like the extra space for the navigation bar, however.

Great work, @Graphics!

 

[Graphics]

Logo on homepage, Is there really no way to simply reduce the logo down and maintain the horizontal aspect? I agree it doesn't look well balanced when placed below as it was meant to flow seamlessly on from Bitcoin horizontally. The logo is essentially only two words long plus the Bitcoin symbol

 

[Aquent]

Some thoughts:

1. I don't think the site needs to mimic bitcoin.org, and in fact I prefer that it doesn't. I'd like Bitcoin Unlimited to appear fresh and exciting. A return to the original vision for Bitcoin.

2. Now that someone mentioned it, I do find it odd to have Satoshi Nakamoto's name three times side by side (I like all the quotes, however). Not sure what to suggest...

3. Under "Our latest work" it appears that everything is listed twice.
3.b. Also, could the link to my fee market paper open up the PDF version instead? Until we get the equations looking proper in the HTML version, I'd rather hide it. The link is: http://www.bitcoinunlimited.info/downloads/feemarket.pdf

4. I'm not sure I like how the navigation menu folds when you reduce the window with. This happens at even moderate window widths:

Also, it appears as though the aspect ratio of the Bitcoin Unlimited logo is altered (i.e., the circle is an ellipse!).

To kill two birds with one stone, I suggest we use Adrian's idea of writing "unlimited" in small underneath the word "bitcoin," but keep @Graphics saturated orange coin. This will reduce the width of the logo and help with the navigation menu problem too.

5. Before this goes live, it seems weird to have the same picture float in as used for the background. Also, the background picture is too zoomed in. I think this needs to be refined.

6. Rather than "strength in numbers" how about something more inline with our goals: "A payment network for planet Earth" or something like that.

7. Social media icons: do these even work? I would prefer to omit them entirely unless someone is actually going to keep them up-to-date.

Thank you for the detailed comments Peter. I have now resized the logo so the navigation should hopefully look fine in reasonable resolutions. I have made some further changes incorporating your suggestions.

Open again now for more comments

The background picture may seem a bit zoomed in, but that's because it needs to he a height of 400px. Not sure if @Graphics can provide a version of it with dimensions of 400 x 1366 (1366 being the most common resolution I think)

I wanted to incorporate the blockchain pic in a new slide, but it's dimensions are more for a full background and it would become too zoomed in when I tried to incorporate.

I have added a credits section at the bottom to replace the icons. As with any credits it is a bit difficult to decide who to mention etc, but I have in a way mentioned everyone by linking at the members page. I was wondering what you guys think of that addition and if cool what you think of the chosen names and if cool whether the nicks shown wish to provide their real names.

The changes are only on the home page for now as I wanted to get some feedback first before incorporating them in all pages.

Only remaining thing is for the downloads link. @theZerg am I right in thinking that the binaries are held at public/downloads/(software name) or are you hosting them somewhere else, if so could you provide the path so that I can update the download links and then everything should be working fine.

http://aquentus.github.io/BitcoinUnlimitedWeb/bitcoinUnlimited/index.html

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

@Aquent

Can the members be given a chance to rewrite their blurbs? I don't think most of us were expecting those to be our representational statements about the project to the world.

 

[Aquent]

@Zangelbert Bingledack - I should think so. It is pretty easy for me to incorporate any statement so, certainly from my view.

If you wish to give true names and perhaps accreditation of some sort as well then feel free to do so. Of course totes anon is also cool from my view, like that's how I'm keeping mine

 

[Georg Engelmann]

@Aquent why did you link the /r/btc subreddit instead of the /r/bitcoin_unlimited sub?

 

[rezzme]

@Aquent I am on the fence about mine -- I'll probably stay "anon" not because I care about being anon necessarily, but because all of my past discourse on Reddit has been with this name. I almost feel like in many instances, having our better known screennames is more valuable than publishing our real name if we've done little in the ecosystem under our real name, or use our real name in totally different contexts less connected to bitcoin more often.

To take an extreme example, let's say I owned a chain of the most successful book stores in the world, maybe we accept BTC or maybe we don't, but then I was also a BU dev under an anon-name, there's no value in quoting my real name.

 

[Mengerian]

Wow, awesome work everyone. Website looks great @Aquent !

@Graphics, I concur with the others, the graphics you made look really good!

Minor suggestion: How about "unleash the potential" instead of "release the potential"? To me it sounds a bit more dramatic. It also could fit in with some other alliterative wordplay to go along with Unlimited, like user-friendly, user-controlled, universal, unified, united.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

I imagined the "release the potential" thing was a reference to "blocking the stream" + "release the river."

 

[Graphics]

I did have it as unleash before settling on release. Thought unleash had connotations of wild, and out of control even aggressive "setting the dogs on someone , release more orderly and considered. " release the hounds"

 

[Peter R]

@Aquent

This is coming together very nicely! Thank you for all of your hard work!! Here are my comments:

1. I agree with ZB that members should have the option of re-writing their quote (and also of removing their presence entirely)

2. [I changed my mind, see below] Personally, it doesn't matter to me whether I'm listed on the homepage (I do like being listed as a "member" however). That being said, I understand that it can be helpful for one's career to be recognized for contributions like graphics design, website creation, etc., so I certainly have no issue with people who contributed being listed if that's what they want.

3. The small graphic that "flies in" is still visually unappealing to me. I think we either need something with more contrast or to remove it completely.

4. Hopefully @Graphics can adjust the image size for the home-page slide show. (I'd love to see a few cool images that scroll through).

5. On some pages, there are headings in green (e.g., on FAQs "All Your Questions Answered") but dark gray on others (e.g., on Proposals "Bitcoin Unlimited Improvement Proposals").

6. The link to my "subchains" paper under Supporting Documents has the (PDF) at the beginning but at the end for all the other documents.

7. The logo and navigation bar look great and re-size great now for me! However, it looks like only the home page was changed. Can all the pages share this same logo / nav bar?

8. The attribution of the quotes to Satoshi should probably have an en-dash before his name:

-- Satoshi Nakamoto

9. How about adding the word "Bitcoin" to the phrase on the homepage image: "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System"


I tend to be very particular about visuals so if people thinking I'm being too picky, feel free to ignore my suggestions!

 

[Peter R]

Thinking more about #2, I think we should avoid naming people on the home page. The one exception might be something (small) like "Images by @Graphics" or "Website design by @Aquent." For example, I don't think there's any reason to name me, since my name is already on my contributions (my two papers). After the election, obviously we can name the President, Secretary and Developer, but those should probably just be at the top of the "Members" page.

 

[Aquent]

Thank you for your helpful comments @Peter R . I added the Credits section because that space looked a bit ugly as fully empty after removing the social icon logos. Not sure what can be added there instead of credits?

@chmod755 I am not sure if r/bitcoin_unlimited is being used. I thought mentioning r/btc there might help set r/btc as the go to sub rather than r/bitcoin. I think that's pretty important right now so I'd rather leave it as r/btc, but if you guys think otherwise then that's cool with me.

 

[Georg Engelmann]

@Aquent what I don't like about /r/btc is Roger Ver's unwillingness to work together with other communities like this forum.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

Ver's position is unfortunate, but the alternative is to link to /r/BitcoinXT, which would seem a little odd and has a lot fewer users, or to /r/Bitcoin where BU is usually censored. Have to pick the least of the three evils for now, I think.

 

[Georg Engelmann]

@Zangelbert Bingledack

Why not /r/bitcoin_unlimited?

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

No traffic yet. Once it picks up organically that'd be ideal. I don't know @seweso well enough to know how uncensored it would be, but from what little I do know I'm guessing completely.

 

[Georg Engelmann]

It's not going to get traffic if you don't link it anywhere.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

Point taken. It's a matter of weighing the priorities: do we more want to point people to where the discussion is right now (good for the short term), or do we more want to incentivize people to use a dedicated forum that - I guess - isn't censored (good for the long term)?

 

[Aquent]

@Zangelbert Bingledack what would you like your member's section to state instead?