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RubyGems.org Redesign (rubygems.org)
74 points by bradly on Nov 19, 2014 | hide | past | favorite | 24 comments



Huge thanks to DockYard for working on the design on this; it looks amazing!

As an open source maintainer, one of the most valuable things people can contribute is great design. Not a lot of designers think to spend their spare time contributing to open source.

If you work at a company with great designers and you ever notice they have some spare cycles, you can have a huge impact by helping them contribute to your favorite open source project. Not only does the open source project get desperately-needed design, your company gets the increased visibility that goes with it. (How much is that DockYard logo on the front page worth in advertising $$$?)


This looks good but two things:

1] The guides section is still on the older design which I'm guessing will be updated later?

2] IMHO on the show gem page the authors/owners section should be moved below licence + versions/runtime-deps sections. The later are more important for first time scanning especially when looking for a new gem.


We just pushed out changes to the guides!


Congratulations! About time you started catching up to the likes of http://bower.io/ and http://rails-assets.org/.


Am I the only one that feels the color was just too glaring for my eyes? My eyes couldn't stand looking at the page for 5 secs.


Same here. Maybe "flux" adds to that?


I tried toggling redshift (An Open Source, Ubuntu-friendly alternative for flux) and it does make a little difference, but hardly enough to warrant the "glare".

Personally, I like it. Especially since the way I use rubygems makes me hardly ever land on the frontpage; all other pages are much "whiter".


No, it nearly gave me a seizure. It might just be the super bright IPS panel, though.


On the page for a gem [0] there is a lot of padding. It makes the page feel larger than it needs to be to present the little information it has.

[0] e.g. https://rubygems.org/gems/aws-mfa


I appreciate rubygems.org, I visit the site every other day. I think a simple and functional design works better than this one. This looks over-designed and gets in its own way. The colors don't go well together. The old design works better for me, I find it more accessible and functional. Just giving feedback as someone that cares a lot about rubygems.org.


first impression:

i spent about 30 seconds scanning around the page looking for the search bar


I saw it immediately but I can see how that can happen. On the web, an underline doesn't quite scream "input" as much as a white rectangle with a border does.


No offence but even with the extremely bright colour scheme it was quite obvious.


Not with a smaller monitor. 13" rMBP and it took me a while to see it - it's obscured by the globe wireframe.

https://picto.io/i/IatX8owh.png


Looks like you fall between a couple of sweet spots with the responsive design. If you reduce your browser width a bit more I'm guessing you see the brighter globe wireframe disappear and the search bar becomes more obvious?

They could probably fix this by throwing in some more media queries that do the same thing (toggle the brighter globe) but based on `min-height` rather than width-alone.


And the globe wireframe doesn't show either on my QHD monitor or in my FullHD portrait...


Same here. The design bar were "hidden" and non obvious.


It says "Search" and I found it in 3 seconds.


Why is it orange? Ruby should be red.

The background is a gradient from orange to red, but the orange is on top, so the header is orange.

http://rubygems.org/red.jpg


I really don't like the tiny 'copy' icon aside the gem install code:

http://rubygems.org/gems/rails

And it shows as 'Missing...' on a browser without flash.


Considering that searching for gems is the primary call to action, adding an autocomplete drop-down would help users a lot.


The font in the guides looks awful on my Windows machine, it became more readable if I reduced the size.


Looks great! Was here earlier today


the red color hurt my eyes. ORZ...




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