Posted on 5 Comments

on geek sites and logo colours…

Just two observations as I was browsing along today… see https://glassfish.dev.java.net/ (the GlassFish site).

What is GlassFish, you may ask? Well you may indeed ask that, it’s not unreasonable to do so ;-), but the site (or at least the front page) won’t tell you. This is just a funny observation that actually holds true for many if not most geek-focused software products. A site will rave on about the latest version and news, but nowhere will you see described what it actually is. CLEARLY, if you are looking at the site, you already know, right? WRONG 😉

Then, and this is just seriously funny IMHO, look at the pool of logos on the right, all except the NetBeans one are in these shades of orange and blue. Most of them come from Sun/Java, and there’s of course the MySQL logo. They really do neatly blend together. What a charming coincidence! (the current MySQL logo and font/colourscheme was developed by a Finnish agency, around 2001)

Posted on 5 Comments

5 thoughts on “on geek sites and logo colours…

  1. Yeah it’s a really common problem, having to dig to find out WTF they’re talking about. Having the changelog as the only content on the front page isn’t exactly informative. Sure, for the people who know what the page is about, knowing that “Bug 564 memory leak in core module: fixed” is good, but first should be something for first-time visitors. A succinct, three-line description in the form “ is a which helps you do in context.”

    Part of the reason for all the Rails stuff is that they get this right.

    That GlassFish one is hilarious. This is about as useful as your average corporate mission statement: “The GlassFish community is building free, open source, production-quality, enterprise software.”

  2. Really got my day started smiling, thanks 🙂

  3. Well there’s a lot more to GlassFish than being just a Java EE app server (portal, ESB, telco SIP, Ajax, etc.). Maybe we should add something along the lines of “(and btw we do a Java EE App Server)”. Also the “Start” link/icon takes newcomers to a reasonnably interesting page (IMO).
    -Alexis (Sun)

  4. <smiling>Of course, you don’t bother to say what Glassfish is either. Is it like a pet goldfish except right side up?</smiling>

  5. Well that wasn’t the point of the post, was it now… no sense distracting the reader.

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