I'm Jin, and I'll be working on the designs for the Stack Exchange sites as they graduate from the beta phase. Each site will have its own unique theme that will reflect its topic. However, all sites will share quite a bit of common elements so they feel like they're part of the Stack Exchange family.
Thank you for your input in the brainstorming session thread.
Logo
The logo is a key element in the design because it's not just used on the site. It represents the community in other mediums as well, for example t-shirts, stickers, business cards and other types of swag. It should be memorable and stand on its own. During my research on SharePoint for the design, I've read several articles that gave me inspiration for the logo design.
According to The SharePoint Wheel (via Wikipedia),
Microsoft's SharePoint marketing refers to the "SharePoint Wheel" to help describe the package of functionality built into the SharePoint platform. The wheel refers to six abstract functional abilities: Sites, Communities, Content, Search, Insights, and Composites.
From Meet the father of Microsoft SharePoint: Jeff Teper
“Teper saw a trend from customers. He was in our competitive team,” recalled Tom Rizzo, a director of marketing in the SharePoint group. “People had lots of documents and file shares. Search, documents, Office and the Web were all coming together. They (Teper and his colleagues) told (Chairman) Bill (Gates) and (CEO) Steve (Ballmer) that we needed to invest in this category.”
I want the logo to reflect the six functions and the sharing concepts.
The nodes represent the six functions. The cube formed by the nodes and the connecting lines convey the idea that SharePoint is a whole service package. The flow bounded inside of the cube also forms an "S." I believe this logo design works very well both in form and function.
Will it translate well to other mediums? I think so. Here are some mockups of the T-shirts and moderator cards we'll be making in the future.
click on the images below to see the full resolution versions
Overall Site Design
For the site design, I agree with Alex Angas's comment:
SharePoint is always changing. [...] So to base the design on what SharePoint is right now either in look or features, is something that won't stand the test of time.
[...] a design that's fairly generic but tips its head to Microsoft's aesthetics may be worth considering.
I've given this a lot of thought. SharePoint by itself doesn't have a visual guideline. People use it as a CMS and create templates for it. I think the design should somewhat resemble Microsoft's UI design aesthetics. But which MS UI? Microsoft's designs have evolved quite a bit over the years.
Two years ago, when I saw the Microsoft Office Labs 2019 Vision video, I was truly impressed. Since then, we're seeing more elegant designs by Microsoft, namely the Metro UI that's being used on the Win7 Phone and the upcoming Windows 8. I believe the Metro UI is the future for MS products.
I love the simplistic elegance of the Metro UI and I believe it would serve a content heavy site such as ours very well. Its vibrant pictogram icons and elegant typography give a good balance to a minimalistic design.
Here's the final SharePoint Stack Exchange site design I came up with, the design goals are:
- to mimic the Microsoft Metro UI
- to have a strong branding identity to set SharePoint.SE apart from all the other SP sites.
- still feel like a part of the Stack Exchange network.
click on the images below to see the full resolution versions
The mockups above do not have all the site elements, but they should give you a good idea of the overall look and feel.
I'd love to hear your feedback. If there are no major design changes, I'd like to launch the site very soon. So an early congrats from me, and thank you for being an awesome community!