[drupal-devel] Brochure Design

[Andre Molnar]

Just a quick response:

First off - thank you for the thoughtful response.

It is the intention to include the existing graphic on architecture. 
Its very effective and a very good illustration.

We would still like to include the use-cases - but they have not been 
re-written (not even entirely sure they need to be).

This wasn't a start from scratch, just a re-write of some of the main 
ideas with an added focus on user benefits.  The intended layout will 
almost be the same - unless there are better suggestions.

I don't think we want to pour this into the design - but work out what 
'fits' and 'works' and modify the text accordingly.

I've copied your comments to the project page, and I will try and 
incorporate as many changes as you suggest - you raise a number of valid 
points.

andre

Steven Wittens wrote:
> Some quick comments:
> 
> - The opening doesn't tell me anything if I'm not at home in the world 
> of CMSes. I think this is an important aspect, and something that I 
> noticed myself when I showed the old brochure to others. They said: 
> "Nice, but what does it DO?". Phrases like "establish online presence" 
> or "manage online activities" are a lot more vague than "build your 
> website". I participated in a student-organised website contest at my 
> university a while ago: most sites were simple, plain, non-interactive 
> affairs. When polling the other contestants about this, most of them 
> said "yes, but I'm not a programmer and I don't know anything about PHP 
> / MySQL / ...". When I talked to them, I tried to make it clear that 
> with systems like Drupal, you can set up complicated features without 
> touching a single line of code.
> 
> - Mentioning "friend of a friend" in such a prominent position at the 
> top seems wasteful: it is not a core feature and very few people are 
> familiar with it. Perhaps it should be "user identity" modules.
> 
> - Search engine optimization should mention clean URLs. They are an 
> important feature. And not only do we have clean URLs, but we also allow 
> arbitrary custom URLs. And with pathauto module, automatic, meaningful 
> URLs derived from the content. We could add a bold claim: "Drupal sites 
> consistently rank high in search results.". It is what several of our 
> users have said:
> http://drupal.org/node/20033
> 
> - The "stability" "speed" and "power" sections seem to overlap a lot. 
> Even if there are subtle underlying differences, it is my experience 
> that this is lost on unfamiliar readers and perceived as repetition 
> instead. Perhaps they should be merged into a single section 
> "Performance and stability", while "power" should be aimed more at 
> modularity and flexiblity.
> 
> - A title like "Power that expert users and IT administrators demand" is 
> completely ineffective and near-impossible to use in a nice design.
> 
> - The "feature rich" section seems to mention Drupal's modularity as a 
> side-effect... in the last brochure this was a very important section 
> covering one full "flap". It illustrated effectively how many features, 
> which would be hardcoded and/or inflexible in a traditional CMS, are 
> removable and customizable in Drupal. Now it's more like "yeah, you can 
> turn stuff off if you don't like it, and modules have something to do 
> with it". This hardly describes what Drupal modules are and the way they 
> can hook into every aspect of the CMS and integrate every feature with 
> every other feature, or how most features (like the profile module) are 
> built as a flexible system rather than a fixed set of functions. While 
> underlying architecture is not directly important for end-users, it is 
> important for customizability and flexibility. If you don't include a 
> big "architecture" section, at the very least you should
> 
> - All in all, I think many people are a lot more familiar with the term 
> "open source" rather than free. "Free", to me, reminds me more of how 
> Drupal doesn't tie you down to fixed things, but how every component is 
> built as a flexible, customizable system. "Freedom" as a section header 
> just doesn't strike me as effective (especially when you consider how 
> that certain country *cough* has been abusing the word recently).
> 
> - The text introduces a lot of concepts, but lacks concrete illustration 
> and examples. The last leaflet's use cases were nice in this, but we 
> could improve it by tying examples directly into the listed points.
> 
> - Perhaps we could include a "what do people say about Drupal?" section. 
> There are plenty of nice quotes on the forums, like the one about search 
> results.
> 
> - The text needs a definite proofreading: "Bryte" "several organization" 
> ...
> 
> And as a graphics person, I think it is really a bad idea to write the 
> text, then have it 'poured' into a brochure. Brochures have a very 
> specific design to them and are read in a certain fashion (I tried to 
> illustrate this in the brochure thread on drupal.org). This text doesn't 
> seem to be written with presentation in mind, and that's a pity: 
> presentation and content should go hand in hand. It also seems too short 
> to fill a whole brochure..
> 
> To be honest I can see no remains of the last brochure in this... it 
> feels as if you started from scratch! A lot of discussion preceded the 
> creation of the last brochure with some nice ideas and try outs to learn 
> from:
> http://drupal.org/node/7782
> The last brochure had several problems, but it did many things right as 
> well. It would be silly to ignore all that...
> 
> Steven Wittens
>