Layout graphic ideas

[Chris Pressey]

On Tue, 24 Feb 2004 01:08:22 -0500
David Cuthbert <dacut at xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Chris Pressey wrote:
> > Just to be clear: I don't mind having a slogan [...]
> 
> Hm; I wouldn't think of these as slogans, per se, but more of a 
> tongue-in-cheek way of saying that, while the project is serious, we 
> don't take ourselves *too* seriously.

Well, consider that, for someone with no prior knowledge of DragonFly,
coming to the site for the first time, it's only natural for them to
*treat* that text underneath the main heading as DragonFly's slogan.

Then maybe they surf to a few other pages, and if they're astute, they
refine their assessment: DragonFly seemingly has a different slogan for
every page!  And maybe some of them appear to be apropos at first (for
example, "Here be Dragons" on the "Mascot" page, ok,) but most of them
don't, and some of them appear to be repeated on two different pages.

It's only when they start revisiting pages that they have already
read, that they might begin to catch on to the fact that it's random.

At which point, I don't know what their reaction would be.  Depends on
the person, I guess.  But if it's anything like mine, they'll
immediately be somewhat annoyed in a vague way.  I'm not sure *why* this
is my reaction, but I can make a guess - the random text attracts undue
attention ("watch this space! it could be *anything* next time!") for
near-zero information gain ("oh, it's just another variation on 'yay
DragonFly we rock', I guess I shouldn't be surprised".)

In this way, it's a lot like the marquees and blink tags of old -
distracting and gratuitous.  Some might say tasteless, or even tacky.

> Stuff that you couldn't do on a stuffy corporate site.

Tongue-in-cheek is good, but I really believe this particular
application of tongue-in-cheek is just too in-your-face, if you don't
mind the mixed metaphor :)

> (Which may or may not be the desired/a desirable message to send, but 
> I'll leave that for others to debate.)

OK.  Hope this message shed some light on why I'm on the "not desirable"
side of said debate.

-Chris