There's a fine line you can cross with minimalist design where it suddenly feels cold, generic, and frail. And I believe Github has crossed this line with this new homepage. I also echo some other's lamentations that Octocat is gone. It's just not.. fun.
I always found all of those 'fun' elements of GitHub to be sort of patronizing. It took extra effort for me to get past all of that 'fun' gloss to appreciate what a powerful tool it could be.
That's what makes design so challenging. Both you and I want to use the product and have legitimate but different tastes. New homepage looks like an improvement to me.
This is why I always stare down people who make jokes at work. I'm not getting paid to laugh, I'm here to slave my life away for someone else... brevity be damned!
I don't think cold and generic is necessarily a bad thing for github at the current stage of their evolution. They've already got about as good a reputation as they can possibly have among developers, and any logged in user never sees the homepage.
They don't need to market to developers anymore. Developers are going to be requesting approval from their bosses or purchasing managers to use github, and what the homepage needs to do is reassure the purchasers that github is a serious business.
generic = corporate/mainstream appeal. they're not marketing to hackers anymore. as a github user, how many times will you be looking at their homepage?
Few years ago Mark Simonson, its creator, was the first type designer with balls big enough to let go of a tight control over PN's distribution and embrace its online use. Back then uttering "Cufon" or "embedding" on Typophile would give you strange looks at best and a flame war centered around lost profits and piracy at worst. He was also one of few designers to extensively hint fonts for on screen use _in smaller sizes on Windows_. PN was basically the first non-OS font that looked great on Windows in 11px. The last contributing factor was that in all caps PN looked very close to Gotham, but it was also few times cheaper. If you ever looked at Gotham, you know how well it works as a heading font. And PN was the only online-friendly alternative.
In other words, the position that Proxima Nova enjoys now is directly related to the liberal license that Mark released it under and the hard and focused work he put into polishing it for the online use. Props to him.
That's really interesting. I know that type designers and foundries are historically pretty conservative in terms of licensing/sharing/etc, so it's great to see someone reaping the benefits for bucking that trend.
Yup! We use Proxima-Nova. It's probably the next Helvetica Neue (i.e. hipster designers will be rolling their eyes at you soon).
One of the things that's great about it is there are so many variations: Regular, Light, Regular Italic, Light Italic, Semibold, Bold, Extrabold, Black, Semibold Italic, Bold Italic.
Most other sans-serif typefaces we evaluated didn't have enough variation that it could reliably service any use-case.
Agreed on the huge range of weights and styles. I experimented with almost all of them for http://peterjmags.com/ before settling on the current two for headings. Each variation that I tried had such a different impact on the overall design and "character" of my site. To me, that's the mark of a well-designed family of type.
I have a little project where I'm collecting uses of web fonts and half the sites I come across are using Proxima Nova: http://www.typ.io/fonts/proxima_nova... But it _is_ nice and incredibly versatile. I love its caps and its bold.
I saw it and immediately thought "Bootstrap". The large width top item, followed by three columns with graphics followed by text, is like the Bootstrap site itself[1] and many others which use Bootstrap. I do like the new homepage, whereas I felt that the old one was overwhelming.
It looks practically the same as dropbox & basecamp homepages to me, to use other examples of massive behemoths in the new wave of successful startups.
To me, it certainly doesn't look un-trust worthy and is better than 99.99% of home pages. What do you consider a 'trusted company' look? Be interesting to link some examples! Always fascinating to see how massively taste makes a difference. I don't want to put words into your mouth, but is Salesforce's homepage a trusted company look?
I'm not even a github fanboy, I think their interface still needs a lot of work and has a lot of massive annoyances (e.g. showing commit messages next to files and folders, bloody awful UX choice IMO, so confusing). And I still don't get the point of the command bar/search uselessness. Google searches github a lot better than they do thanks. And Reddit. And Hacker News. And Stackoverflow. So much wasted programming time making useless search systems, so annoying the Chrome bizarrely tries to actually use those search systems.
It took me about two minutes to do all of that. Updating the github homepage would take at least two orders of magnitude greater effort, more likely closer to three.
"I don't have the time" is an expression for "Is no relevant enough for me to do something about it". If your house gets on fire doesn't matter how busy you are at the moment you will do something about it.
Got the same gist (harhar). With all of the super user-friendly updates they've been pushing out lately, this homepage makes it look like a service those types of people wouldn't think of using. And it is boringly Bootstrap-y looking.
i assume you're just joking here, but it's a trend i've noticed on reddit: any comment or submission that has anything to do with voting, whether actual reddit votes or elections or anything else, gets more votes than something that doesn't reference voting. It reminds people to vote.
I know I'm going to be downvoted for this, but adding the expression "I know I'm going to be downvoted for this" is probably the easiest way to get upvotes on any social site. I guess it reminds people to vote, and most readers don't actually care to downvote you. (Usually comments will make "haters" really angry but not have any impact on people that agree or are neutral, so you get downvoted on a comment that most people like. "I know I'm going to get downvoted" causes the neutrals to realize that they need to upvote you to avoid the evil downvotes from the Other Clan. Or something.)
Haha, interesting edit. :) I think the reason is that people are expecting a discussion of these kinds of decisions (Reverting back to a minimalist design, how to AB test maybe, and so on), and since GitHub is known to pretty much everybody, its the perfect chance to do so. Or at least this is why I came here.
Since the theme is "working together is better than working alone", a group of octocats holdings hands/tentacles together would be nice. The octocats should be varied sort of like the ones here: http://octodex.github.com/ (maybe to a lesser degree, but the effect will be diminished if they all look the same).
i think it's stupid ... putting the apple, windows, android logo on the frontpage, getting rid of their own playful brand element(octocat) completely. oh, and on top of that adding two meaningles illustrations that can only be seen as an insult to any thinking developer.
as a person who is kinda proud of having octocat as one of two stickers on my mac i have to say: it sucks and i cant identify with it.
tl;dr: get rid of the apple/mac/android logos, bring octocat back.
Homepages aren't designed to appeal to people who have already signed up for the service. At least in Github's case, the homepage is purely for marketing.
I dig it. Looks nice and makes me want to use the service, but I can't get past the cost of the private repos. The unlimited, free, private repos are what keep me at BitBucket.
How many private repos do you need ? I just have one private incubator repo that contains all the throw-aways and ideas that I have. If something grows well enough I export the subtree into a public repo and voila.
Also limiting the number of private repos makes sense for Github since they also want to build a community.
I'm a big fan of BitBucket. Not a big fan of how poorly GitHub handles memory and where it stores all of the files, but I pay for BitBucket - I have at least over a dozen repos.
Wow, it just occurred to me that I never see the github home page when I visit the site, seeing as I'm always logged in on the machines I use.
Compared to that cached version, I much prefer the new one. This is despite agreeing and lamenting that there is nothing particularly fun about it. But hey, I'm not even sure what I mean by that :)
When I needed to get my rails-update-fix I usually checked from my ipad where I haven't logged in to my github account.. then I used the railslink on top. Now it's gone :/ First world probblem :P.
I really dislike the new design.
Also, it's just me or the fonts are horribly cluttered? I'm guessing it's my fault and I need some font installed or something, because it's really awful.
I like this design, it's clean, minimal and yet still professional. It's a reflection of the way the web has been (thankfully) moving the last few years.
