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Comment by sgdesign | Hacker News Reader

If you can't compare the Go site and, say, http://git-scm.com/ and see which one is better designed, then I don't think anything I can say will change your mind. It's just a general feeling, specific objections are not important. But here are a few anyway:

-There is no logo to establish a brand identity

- The mascot looks amateurish

- There is no thought given to typograph or colors. Contrast this with the Git site where, for example, body copy is not pure black to avoid a harsh contrast.

- The documentation uses a fluid width layout which hurts readability on wide screens

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You are treating "better designed" as a single axis: the question should be "better designed for X" given a specific value of X. As an example, to take your feedback item "the mascot looks amateurish" <- the kind of quirky humor that the people who designed this project have, and are thereby are appealing to, actually likes that mascot. In the genre of programming languages, this is quite honestly very typical: that mascot is part of what makes it feel like a programming language "worth paying attention to" to people like me (aka, people who study and learn interesting programming languages).

Without taking into account this context, your feedback is frankly about as closed minded and generally insulting as claiming that XKCD (or hell: anything by Don Hertzfeldt, which is probably an even stronger extreme case) is poorly executed because the artwork is likewise "amateurish" to someone used to full-color 3D rendered 60 fps animation (or hell: an actual HD video). However, these people have managed to entrench an entire genre of art that now others try to invoke in their own audiences.

Personally, I find the git-scm.com website to be full of way too much clipart and not enough personality; to the extent to which there is personality, I might call it "Web 2.0 with a hint of retro-corporate", which is highly awkward as I have always felt git represented something grungier, certainly "harsher": tied to ideas like raw power and distributed anti-disestablishment as opposed to control or simplicity. However, someone liked that website, and apparently you do. I find http://darcs.net/ much better at first glance, for a version control tool.

The original author (edit: apparently, also you) even liked the Firebase website, which has always turned me off as something designed to attract people who don't know what they are doing: it feels too "Web 2.0" and has much too strong an emphasis on "nothing to something" as opposed to "something to something great" to be a product to which I'd trust storing my data. Of course: I'm not in their target market, as I don't need their service and in fact "know too much" and can nitpick how they built it; they are targeting people who don't know enough to build backends, and that design thereby probably works for them. I thereby can't negatively judge their website without paying attention to that context.

tl;dr different strokes for different folks

I designed the Go site, so I just wanted to point out some things.

The Gopher is the logo and our brand identity. He was designed by Renée French, an award-winning illustrator. Perhaps you think his presence is amateurish, but I disagree. We are professionals, but we are also a community and we like fun. The gopher is emblematic of Go as a project.

I gave plenty of thought to the typography and colors. There is a spare color palette, and I chose complimentary blues and yellows. I chose a consistent set of font sizes. You may have a different aesthetic taste to me, but you can't say that no thought was given. Also, the darkest text on golang.org is #222. There is no pure black.

The previous design had a max-width for all docs, but it was widely criticized by users of the site. That's why I removed it in the redesign. The users are happy, and I'm not one to disagree with them. If you find it hard to read you can just make your browser window narrower. This was a UX decision.

Ultimately the site is a resource and I certainly spent more time concentrating on UX than the visual appearance. It may be simple and it may not have enough gradients (or whatever) for your tastes, but the design is consistent and well thought out.

Thanks for taking the time to write up your thoughts. I know your heart is in the right place, but in the end you did come across as presumptuous and holier than thou.

    - There is no logo to establish a brand identity.

The mascot is the logo and it does establish a brand identity. It's reminiscent of the plan nine rabbit glenda and is part of a heritage of well designed systems stretching back to the beginnings of unix. It establishes exactly the brand and identity that the creators/core developers want to create.

    - The mascot looks amateurish.

See comment above

    - There is no thought given to typograph or colors.

I'm no expert but the go site is readable and so is the git site. They look different but both are readable and pleasant on my eyes.

   - The documentation uses a fluid width layout which hurts readability on wide screens.

Possibly true but it's the only indictment you list that I find plausible. I think you may have had a good point to make but you used a terrible example in Go's site.

Go's mascot was drawn by a professional illustrator: http://reneefrench.blogspot.com

I think the mascot is stunning.

Its even balanced with the playful sense of minimalism of the language itself.

Why don't you link to git-scm circa 2009 (when Git started getting popular): http://web.archive.org/web/20090303081943/http://git-scm.com... No brand identity? Mascot (or whatever it is in the header) looks amateurish? No thought given ot typograph? And somehow Git managed to kick everyone's ass. Here's a hint how: by being better than all other version control systems and not by having the prettiest website.

But why couldn't you have both?! That's what I mean when I'm talking about a false dichotomy, you're just using a strawman argument.

(For some reason I can't reply to the reply so will have to post here.)

> But why couldn't you have both?! That's what I mean when I'm talking about a false dichotomy, you're just using a strawman argument.

You can't have both because people don't have unlimited amount of time and resources. I'm not sure why I have to explain this.

I love the old git site to be honest. Less eye candy but far more direct in achieving what it does. Hard to knock the domo-kun-esque mascot - with a "you'll get it when you're ready" in-joke to boot.

I would say programmers using go don't really care how amateurish the mascot looks (see the linux penguin) or how good the typography of the website is.

I would assume programmers care about things like:

- How can I get to the documentation fast - How can I start playing around with the language - What are the language features - How do I install the language and how do I use it

all these things are easily accessible through the golang website in my opinion.

> The documentation uses a fluid width layout which hurts readability on wide screens

I agree with this, but I still think the golang documentation is well designed for usability. If you compare this page - http://golang.org/ref/spec - with this page - http://git-scm.com/docs/git-config, you'll see that the golang site has limited the font and background to a few non-glaring colors.

The red text on the git-scm site is just awful. I can scan the golang pages easily, but a page like this - http://git-scm.com/book/en/Git-Basics-Recording-Changes-to-t... - is too visually distracting.

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