David, Carl, Judebert, Jannis and me have worked hard in the past two months on leveraging Serendipity's presentation to a new level and get it all polished up for a 1.0 major release.
The current look of Serendipity was found to be too plain. Many people said they weren't fond of Serendipity when looking at www.s9y.org in first place and nearly dropped using it. The Wiki page does not deliver well, thus we decided a long time ago that we need a good introductory page that leads to all other sort of information: The Blog, the Docs, the Themes, the Plugins and so on.
To keep everything maintenable we decided to stay with the open Wiki for starters instead of some CMS or abusing Serendipity as a presentation layer. We do need to have several developers edit a stable document, but also deliver the Blog in a fast way.
The current logo is quite ill-perceived in the public - once you know it indicates a coffee-cup, the emotion of the logo delivers, but fails to do that on a graphical level. Many people do not connect the logo with Serendipity and primarily recognize the name "Serendipity" as the connection to our software.
Building on that, David has gone through a long period of deriving logo alternations. We figured out that the coffee cup could be improved a lot, but is not such a very well delivering logo icon for a Software that Serendipity is.
Serendipity is all about flexibility, easy to use but with great capabilities to make it do anything you want. It's a very complex system, and with its plugin and Smarty approach can be bent into any direction and fit into diverse user needs. Many users from today only use Serendipity as a simple blog, but it can also power a basic CMS or presentation site, or act as a RSS planet or even be used as a media gallery and community centre. A new logo needs to deliver this, how diverse Serendipity can be.
The new logo that david has come up with and found the agreement of most of use "core fiddlers" can be found here: http://daves.me.uk/s9y/
Of course the logo should speak for itself, but here's an explanation: The arrows indicate the flexible usage scenarios for Serendipity, that it can be bent into virtually any direction. The atom itself indicates the plugin concept of Serendipity: The software itself is a small framework that "powers the world".
Now for the closing words: How do you feel about our current progress? The goal is to release Serendipity 1.0 during April based on the feedback we get from YOU! Constructive criticism is heartly welcome - bear in mind that Serendipity is a product of people who do things in the free time. It is not a commercial product where we can spend money on endless marketing research and logo development. We can only work with what we got, and currently this little team is very fueled up with the want to sparkle Serendipity onto a new level.
The current precise todo list for us splits into:
Jannis: Provides the shiny and new great CSS for our documentation/presentation page on www.s9y.org
Judebert: Provides us with coWiki plugins to get David's mockup to work technically, and integrates Jannis work with the current Wiki, plus integrates his Blog-Comparisons into the wiki.
David: Writes up the Release Announcement for the 1.0 release as well as some other PR texts. And based on the feedback of the logo, do some more work on that.
Carl Galloway: Help improve the documentation
Martin Jacobsen: Might give us some "atom logo" artworks or help in the logo improvement issue
(Of course, any of those people listed surely would love to get help from you - so if you feel that you want to contribute to Serendipity, please drop a note!)
Best regards,
Garvin
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