What should our logo and site design look like?

Question

It's getting close to that time.

The 7 Essential Meta Questions of Every Beta

Quoting:

5) What should our logo and site design look like? This one is pretty straightforward. Solicit contributions, throw out ideas, post preliminary (or finished) designs, and be supportive and respectful of other people’s ideas and creativity.

We have designers on staff who will actively help come up with site designs but, if an idea stemming from the community stands out as exceptional, we are happy to use it.

So, do you have any ideas for a theme? Do you have something you want to see happen here?

Answer 1

Don't flame me, just tossing out an idea.

I think the focus of our site is data management , which IMO is a major building block of application or business.

Thus, the theme or logo I'm thinking is DATA arranged in building blocks (legos?).

Disclaimer: I love legos.

Answer 2

Databases seem to be represented predominately as a set of stacked cylinders. The administrator aspect could be represented by a silhouette of a person, but I'm not sure that would be necessary.

jcolebrand wants some thoughts on a theme, so here goes:

• The theme shouldn't be garish.
• The theme shouldn't distract from content.
• The theme should fit in with other SE sites.
• The theme's widgets not be too strange and should be easy to understand for new users.

Other concepts that might fit the site design:

• A grid reminiscent of a table storing data.
• ER diagrams.
• Venn diagrams.

Answer 3

Comment for DTest:

How about binary lego :)

Answer 4

Some thoughts:

Here's the MS SQL docu pages http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlserver/aa336270 (but they change their design every few years. A couple years back it was a blueish theme, now they've gone predominantly grey)

Here's the Oracle docu pages http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/enterprise-edition/overview/index.html (Also grey)

Here's the MySQL docu pages http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/ blue and orange this time.

The NoSQL guys really don't have a centralized theme on account of that's like saying "flowers" and lumping in everything from roses to daisies to orchids, etc.

The above are the "big three" that most people have to support, but I figure you knew that. This is just some thoughts on what sort of coloration to go for.

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For the codeblocks, I would love to suggest something with a colored stripe on the left hand side, with marginally smaller fonts on the fixed width format. idk if this is easily doable, but just an idea.

I'm drawn to using an orange (a-la the MySQL docu pages) for that left hand margin.

Since the meta will already be grey, I think limiting the amount of gray on the main will be a good idea. So blues become the primary hue, I think. Not altogether unlike sketchy.

However, these are just thoughts. I'm no graphic designer. I stand back and wait to be amazed ;)