I was impressed when you said you were taking feedback on the wordmark at such an early stage.  I’ve had awful meetings with 6 or 7 people on a client team where they dissolve a design to nightmare proportions - 200,000 people are sure going to muddy the water!

I think your lecturer was right - stick to your guns, and don’t take any of the comments personally.  I think this could be what holds designers back from contributing to the open source community on the whole.

It’s great to see Leisa and you put your processes out in the open like this - I hope the Drupal community appreciates who they’re working with!

As somebody who works for The Open University, I’m no stranger to design by committe. It absolutely never results in a cohesive and pleasing end result.

The important thing for me is to get to the root of the stakeholder suggestions for improvement. Sometime people just like to feel that they have contributed in some way regardless of how useful their contribution actually is. Sometimes people just have really misguided ideas about good design and sometimes people are latching on to something they’ve overheard somewhere and want to sound clever in company of peers.

So your ‘design-by-community’ idea works much better as there are more voices and I imagine that more thought will have gone into the suggestions. Also, you’ll have a nice thread in writing to refer to and a solid means to substantiate your choices to the client. Keep us posted on how it goes!

I think this is a very interesting experiment.

I also think that it’s likely to lead to lack-luster results if the feedback is not heavily roped in by one person with one vision. Open Source is the largest committee in the world, and design by committee never produces effective results - too many cooks thinking their own part of the pie is the most important. It leads to designs with a lack of focus and a lack of vision. Design requires one vision to be effective.

I’ll be interested to see how it goes. One nice thing you’ve done though is set up a platform to sidestep the ubiquitous backlash against any design changes to any large site (everyone bitches at any re-design; jQuery, Facebook, Delicious, etc). By involving people (even if you end up ignoring a lot of cruft) they’ll feel they took part and I reckon are likely to be less harsh when the final design goes live.

Of course, they could also bitch to high heaven that their fantastic ideas got binned.

Mark, good on you for doing something out in the open. I think designers tend to hide behind the opaque ‘magic’ of the process a bit too often.

There’s a couple of separate issues with the brand and the web site itself.

I personally think a well designed & executed mark is good enough 99% of the time, it’s actual form, so long as it’s well executed, is not so important, especially in this case. Priority wise, while I know it often comes first to set the tone of the rest of the design (that’s how I work), it could probably come much later. I wouldn’t lose sleep over it. Soak up as much as you can & go with whatever you feel is right would be my 2c. jQuery didn’t live or die because of a change of wordmark.

That’s the branding. The web site on the other hand, is a much different matter.

I believe very strongly in a kind of ‘design by community’ but one that happens live on site based on hard data.

I wrote a long essay about it about a year ago called In the future web sites will design themselves.

The difference when it comes to web design is that you can measure how users interact with the site (ie, what they click) and serve up different design variations (and different combinations of those variations) to see what performs better for a given goal.

The “performs better” bit is what the community *does* rather than what they say they want or will like (which can give you something like the Homer).

This is a whole paradigm shift in the way design is done online (by designers at least), which I intend to pursue quite vigorously :)

The flip side is the data doesn’t tell you *why* users did what they did (you can only make inferences) so that’s where collecting ideas from users can be really helpful.

There’s two basic phases: collecting ideas to test, and then launching and testing them.

The step that’s almost completely cut out of the process is all the conjecture and debate that goes into finding the ‘One True Solution’, which is the normal way of designing.

Imagine cutting all that out and testing all good ideas instead by putting them to the actual users/community, and let the numbers (and the users) speak for themselves… it’s possible right now ;)

In my experience, design by committee usually goes badly. What has always happened to me is a “watering down” of the vision for the project. Say you’ve got 10 guys and each has a vision for where the site should go; usually, I think having them work together on the project is going to produce a worse result than any single designer would have.

So, what I would say to you is: make sure someone (that’s you, I assume), always has the final say, and that you exercise the right to overrule people’s poor taste with your experience and skill. 

I’ll be curious to see how it plays out. I have no doubt that it CAN work, but it definitely takes the right kind of people managing things. You’ll figure it out, I’m sure. :)

I’m ex-civil service so have had my fair share of design by committee. I think you’re mad opening up the design process to all and sundry! Good luck with it.

Was it your own decision to be so open with the design process? Or was there pressure from within Drupal to be more open than you would have liked to have been?

Soliciting opinions on designs is always going to cause trouble I think. It’s like test screening a movie. Interesting to see if people laugh, cry or fall asleep, but giving the audience a survey to ask their opinion is pointless at best and destructive at worst. That’s why looking for trends is an interesting idea… however that will work.

One suggestion I have is to maybe focus more on understanding the community (including the wider community) and ask for feedback on that. And focus less on asking for feedback on the actual work you produce. The idea being that we will be happier to be lead, the more we believe you understand who we are, who we work for, and what we would like to become. I know you are doing this already, so I am simply suggesting you tip the scale this way when communicating. I’m not sure this would help you do your job any better, but it may help the community to get behind you.

On a personal aside, I’m already convinced you are going to do a great job and would prefer to just step out of your way as much as possible.

And I look forward to seeing how you handle our existing camel. Nearly everyone has something to say about that.

I admire your willingness to open the process up to the kinds of comments you received on the first wordmark (which I liked a lot, btw--it has a nice flow, and the lowercase D doesn’t bother me at all).

This strikes me as very much like the student evaluations of teaching we use at my university. Most of these evaluations are of little use. Why is this? Because we’re asking students who know little about teaching to evaluate teaching performance. They often confuse “I like the teacher” with “she’s good"--or more often, “I don’t like the teacher” with “he’s a poor teacher.” The fact is, though, that these students have little basis for making judgments about what is effective teaching and what is not. They can say what their likes and dislikes are, but that’s about it.

Where these evaluations are useful is in uncovering problems with how teachers handle workload: if most students state that graded work wasn’t returned for weeks, then we know there’s a problem with the teacher’s time management skills--but that still doesn’t mean the teacher is good or bad.

Similarly, most of the comments on the wordmark are of little value because the people making the comments don’t have enough expertise to give useful feedback on typeface, kerning, ligatures, and such. Just because you’ve been taught all your life doesn’t mean you can give a thoughtful critique of teaching skill, and the ability to play with fonts in Photoshop doesn’t mean you have a clue what good design is.

Or to use an analogy that may work better for many of those who are passionate about Drupal: I can code html and css, and I have a smidgen of understanding about php--and I’m clearly unqualified to critique a developer’s coding skills as he or she produces a module for use in Drupal. It would be ludricrous for me to suggest to a developer that she should code differently because it just strikes me as wrong. What I can provide feedback on is how the module works for me on my site and whether the interface makes sense.

I suspect that this is reason more useful feedback is occuring with the user interface--all of use who use Drupal and the Drupal.org site have a lot of experience working with their interfaces, and we know what makes things easy and what makes things complicated.

I would suggest keeping the design process hidden until you can show wordmarks and logos in context--I think you’ll get better feedback and you won’t have to spend time dealing with inflammatory comments.

Design by community vs. committee is a really interesting idea, particularly b/c the main difference seems to be the sheer size of the ‘committee’.  I’m really curious how this will turn out.

Hey Mark. A very brave and challenging mission you and Leisa are taking here.

I’m a web developer and part of the Drupal community since 2004 and I’m very excited about your work on the new site and opening the process to all of us, but I’m also a web designer, many of us working on the Web wear many hats right?, and have to agree with your typography lecturer.

And even if I still don’t have the guts to open my design process on-the-run as you’re doing it I think this could be a very interesting experiment, a great design team like yours and a very educated community like Drupal’s (where user experience is always considered) could be the perfect match.

Best of lucks!

"If it falls flat on its arse in the near future, well it will make a bloody good case study.”

Well said, sir. Doing this out in the open leaves an excellent record for design professionals. It may help, in the midst of all the craziness, to “see the end in the beginning,” and know that many designers may be looking back at these efforts in a few years’ time as a well-documented effort at “design-by-community.”

Anyway, thanks for being brave. Your whole firm’s work is going to be a good thing for Drupal.org, even if the process is painful.

I agree in principle that design by ‘community’ could work. But I think that the less productive comments are not coming from people who have the projects best interest at heart.

I think that people’s personal tastes should not be allowed to factor into this sort of thing, since you aren’t trying to serve just one person.
Most people can’t look beyond their own ideas and preferences, as you say, they are the ‘loud voices’, but that doesn’t make their opinion any more important or useful. It’s like the current drupal design and image, I don’t personally find it aesthetically appealing, but I understand how it serves its purpose beyond just what it looks like.

When people comment on this sort of stuff, even if they have good intentions, they will only see and respond to the visual, and they won’t consider the wider view.

Also, your blog allows for anyone to post, even if they aren’t involved with drupal, and knowing the internets, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if people left inflammatory comments just for the sake of it.

A comment on Mark vs Leisa.

Consider your audience consists largely of geeky males in their 20s, and Leisa is a female asking for help with Drupal.

You’re obviously going to get the short end of the stick on that one ;)

It will be intresting to see the Emegent standards and the Imposed Standards

Great article - thenk you for this :)

Leisa’s work uncovers community members’ information needs. Soliciting feedback for her work allows her to build a picture of our information needs regardless of what kind of feedback we give.

Your work does this too. “Drupal’s core brand values” was a great post. But I’m not sure what opening something like the wordmark design process shows us about the community. Maybe it uncovers our communication needs? If that’s the case, then there wasn’t much signal in the signal-to-noise ratio for the “Initial Wordmark design” comments.

Interesting approach of combining design and functionality based on the needs of the community. Looking forward to see the new design in action.

It is an amazing system to use but you need to invest so much time into using it.. imho bespoke is faster better and less hackable.

I got all the information about drupal.org from your blog. right from the basic level to the advance one.

Thanks Keep up the good work.

It´s the first I read about drogal. Unknow in Germany.

That is so awesome that you’re developing the Drupal site, though i still find the current one appealing;) but change really matters!

Is the current Drupal.org Web site the re-designed version or is it yet to be launched? I am sorry, I didn’t have a frame of reference for the old site.

We are a speciallized manufacturer and exporter of fabre, yarn, sweater, shawls, scarves, stoles, ponchos, glove made of pashmina cashmere wool cotton and silk. As an experienced manufacturer, we have exported our products to many countries around the world. Our company has been supplying inner Mangonia pashmina cashmere products to manufacturers (material & yarn), designers, department stores over 20 countries and regions: Italy, UK, France, Germany, USA, Japan, Switzerland, Canada, United States, Russian, Spain, Belgium, Spain, New Zealand, Korea, Hong Kong, India. we provide our global trade customers with high quality products, competitive price as well as excellent client services- http://www.pashminafactory.com

Nice article - I read this with pleasure

thanks for the tip

Since Open Source products expand by themselves - are owned by none but everyone. So even the guys who actually designed the version 0.0 will have a little less idea of how exactly their design has been performing.

I would say just one thing - if open source projects can accept code pieces, updates, bug reports from users - why not design as well.