Coursekit is now Lore | Hacker News Reader

Coursekit is now Lore

lore.com

33 pointsantipax26 comments

It might just be me, but when I see announcements so overly-styled, without the styling having much semantic relevance to the content, I stop trusting the site that made the announcement. I want to place my faith in no-nonsense services, and an announcement like this is all-nonsense.

Lore is an excellent name for a service, though.

I thought the presentation metaphorically enforced the message they were trying to deliver. To me, that's actually useful and not "over-styled" or "all-nonsense" - it's a valid technique to communicate with more than just words and to encourage a viewer (well, a viewer that doesn't distrust animation and/or "styling") to watch the entire presentation.

If it had been done well, I would agree with you. But it was fluff – visually simplistic, yet too generically symbolic to convey anything actually meaningful. What's more, the break between sentences disrupted my actually reading their thoughts, and the animation further distracted from the message.

Text plays by its own rules. If you're using text to express thought rather than to evoke some kind of emotion, you want that text to be as clear and as direct as possible. There are tactics which can be used to enhance the delivery of a statement; this one does nothing but distract from the message.

I disagree. The circles represent people. The metaphor is skillfully used in conjunction with the words.

You don't want to dig deeper on this - fine. I get it. But there is a symbolism being successfully manipulated here and just because you don't like it does not mean it isn't "done well". It just means you don't like it.

That's the sort of "skillful metaphor" a group of high school kids would put in a Social Studies PowerPoint. It's funny that you think what you gleaned from the circles involved any sort of deep digging: the symbolism is as blatant as it is pointless. It's a stylish flourish that adds an animation to thoughts so simple they needed no illustration.

Heh - OK. Yeah, I like the 3 Stooges AND Spalding Gray, so you can get as arrogant as you want to about that.

Some of the other style/substance mavens here agree with you, but this one doesn't. That's all... I think you should be a little more gracious in your dialogue when you start it with "It might just be me...".

I stopped reading during the second instance of floating circles - it's too much visual annoyance for too little payoff.

Ehhhhhh, am I the only one that hates both the name and the presentation?

The name is so highly associated with 'folklore' which is so highly associated with stories that are legendary and part of culture, but clearly factually incorrect (thinking Paul Bunyon etc.). Inspiring fiction.

This is not what Coursekit is.

The presentation is hardly readable: extremely light grey type on a white background with spinny animations going on in the background...nuff said.

Not only that, their old logo kicked ass, and the new one is...meh.

Glad you like it!

Uh...

No need to respond facetiously to valid criticisms.

Yeah, I can barely read the type! I thought there must've been some mistake, but I guess it was a specific choice that they made. If I were Lore, I would change the type to dark grey or black right away.

As a follow up, it's also really hard to read the type in their "our Team Values" slider on the "About" page. It's pretty distracting. Since Lore targets people who create courses (who are often middle-aged or older, which sometimes comes with declining vision), legibility should be a priority when they consider their website.

Yeah, "lore" is nearly synonymous with "myth" to me. Funny choice.

The Coursekit identity (including the name) is one of the strongest I've seen in recent history. So I'm kind of bummed at the change.

The long-winded apologia re: the new name and logo suggests to me that the team is making the switch for reasons that trump design considerations altogether. But for some reason they've couched their explanation in design language.

IMO: customers/users are interested in product, not process. The fancy design brief feels like energy that could be best spent explaining what Lore is and how it will be useful.

I have never heard of them. What are they so well knoiwn for?

Why is it bad to ask? The linked page does not render well on mobile device.

The Coursekit identity was great. It was done by Ed Nacional – http://ednacional.com

Rebranding a college-course websites at the end of the school semester is not a smart idea. :P

It's good that it's only 4 characters, but coursekit had a nice resonance in the sound -- 2 syllables.

Thanks for visiting, guys. You can learn more about our rationale in my post: http://blog.lore.com. We also detail our design process here: http://design.lore.com

Really impressive!! Looks like it's done entirely in HTML/CSS/Coffeescript.

I have to admit surprise that they would put so much effort into something that is not their product, though.

This works well with exp.lore.com as well

The page communicated the process/reasoning really well. Goodluck to the team

All I can think about is Star Trek's Data's evil twin Lore.

Nice domain name!

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