New Homepage

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.

The last version of our homepage never had an Octocat on it :).

I can't say I understand the octocat. It's a very strange character.. but very good. It makes no sense, but I love it.

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?

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.

We use proxima-nova on http://customer.io as well as in all our presentations (e.g. https://speakerdeck.com/sudonim/write-emails-people-will-rea... ) . Love that typeface.

Ha, I was just thinking this the other week and now seeing it on Github makes me want to find another font to use everywhere. Probably won't happen.

Not just this year.

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.

I'm using it on my website as it seems one of the closer ones to Segoe for "metro" style websites.

.. And Open Sans too

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.

Just added customer.io too. ;)

I didn't really think about it until you mentioned it, but the design does feel somewhat dated.

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.

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.

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.

[1] http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/

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.

Especially considered if you are logged into Github, you can't even seen the front page.

>Why so many upvotes for a comment about upvotes?

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.

To play the pedant, they haven't completely gotten rid of Octocat - check out the favicon.

I mentioned it before, but we didn't have an Octocat on the homepage before this.

What Octocat? Do you mean the Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft logos? http://cl.ly/image/1R2h2B3Z2m3x/poop.jpg

I find the trend of seeing every change Github or Bootstrap makes on the front page of HN even more disturbing.

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).

look at the footer

You're not exactly the only sick person, though I generally use my Kindle Fire

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.

Sounds sustainable.

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 :)