Ramaze needs YOU
Ramaze is a Ruby framework that while generally underrated has a lot of potential. Compared to other Ruby frameworks it's probably the most Ruby-like framework as it does not enforce a new way of thinking and developing applications, instead it adds a lot of functionality to Rack and Ruby to make it easier to develop MVC based applications (although you don't have to stick to the MVC pattern).
When looking at other frameworks, regardless of their language, I personally think Ramaze is the most flexible one out there. However, there is one big problem: we're not widely know. This issue is caused by multiple things but the two most important ones are relatively bad documentation and a website that isn't very informative when it comes to helping newcomers. While the documentation is something we've been discussing for quite some time and actually are working on it the website is something we need to let somebody else do. Not because we don't want to do it ourselves but because we're developers and not designers. So far I and several other Ramaze members (manveru, Pistos, etc) have had a few chat sessions and we agreed that the following has to be done regarding the website (ramaze.net)
* The homepage should show a basic example about how to use Ramaze, a good example would be the website of Sinatra (sinatrarb.com)
* A blog to keep people up to date with the latest Ramaze news
* A showcase of Ramaze applications
* A userguide, either in the form of a wiki or something else. Currently there's book.ramaze.net but it's unorganized and out of date
Based on these ideas I made a few rough sketches as well as an initial design, which can be seen here: http://cl.ly/5aKi While the other Ramaze members liked the design I'm not that fond of it myself and I'd rather spend my time coding and improving the actual code rather than making a website :)
What we're looking for is a good designer who's willing to contribute to an open source project by designing the new website for Ramaze. I'm going to be honest with you, there's a good chance you won't earn a penny from it but keep this in mind: you're probably using open source software (Chromium, Firefox, etc) as well so you'd be a big hypocrite and a dick to say "Meh, open source is for fags". Other than that I might be willing to pay money for it based on the results but that's something we'll discuss once there's a better idea of how the design will look, how much time it will take and so on.
What we're not looking for are 12 year old entrepreneurs who think that using a few gradients equals proper design. This may sound rude but I'm going to say it up front to prevent any misunderstandings. Now don't get me wrong, if you're young like me (I'm only 18 actually) this doesn't mean you're not welcome it's just that in general people below a certain age (usually 18-20) don't have enough real-life experience to know how to handle clients. I might have experience in coding but since I've only been doing it for a few years (5 or so) and only about a year on a professional basis I still don't fully get how to handle clients and such. To cut a long story short, here's the type of designer we're looking for:
* Decent amount of experience, knowledge of the web is a big plus
* Understanding of how open source projects work
* Proper knowledge of color theories, we don't need pink + green
* Well organized, I'm not going to wait 2 months for the design so don't bother replying if you feel that it's more important to teabag people in Halo than to finish that design you were supposed to finish 2 weeks ago
Do note that you don't have to slice the design into HTML as we'll handle this ourselves, as rude as it may sound designers tend to have very limited knowledge of how to organize your HTML and CSS in a proper way. We're just looking for somebody to create the actual design.
In order to make your life easier here are some extra details about Ramaze:
* The color scheme is red and gray mainly but other colors are welcome as long as they mix with the logo (https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/efb21e9eb7a8ced4c808086b77cd86d0?s=140)
* Ramaze is an agnostic framework, this means you can use pretty much anything the way you want it without breaking things
* The GitHub account is located here: https://github.com/ramaze
* Ramaze is mostly a community driven framework, while there are a few "core" contributors a lot of the code has been added by "regulars"
If there's anything else you need feel free to ask. I would prefer it if you would reply in this thread if you're interested rather than Emailing me, this makes it easier for others to see who's interested plus it's easier for me to share everything with the other Ramaze guys. If you insist on Emailing me my address is info@yorickpeterse.com.