Hi guys,
I'm the author of that second design, although I'm not really a designer.
I'll try a variation using colors that resemble the 'official' ones so you can choose which one you like better.
The thing is the current proposal uses 4 indicative colors and a greyscale for the rest.
Green for general highlighting: Used in the overview section and all the non-work related sections of the site.
Blue for haskellers, information mostly reelevant to people looking for haskellers is in that color, so the 'find a haskeller' section and usernames are in that color for example.
Orange for jobs, if you're looking for a job everything that's in orange may be interesting to you.
Red is for site alerts or messages that prompt you to do something, like registering or notifying you should add your screen name to your profile.
I think maybe I can use some shade of grey to replace green and red, and use the 'official' maroon (red?) and blueish instead of red and blue.
Not that I want to start a debate, but below are my views on having an official look, as I shared in a private conversation a few days back:
I'm not sold on the benefits of having the same palette across all
sites.
I think the point mark Lentczner Makes about using different layouts also applies to colors.
Colors also carry a message, they let you know for example if a website is informal, technical, institutional, etc.
Visual
consistency helps usability a lot, I probably wouldn't have different
layouts and colors for different parts of the same site. To me,
everything that's inside the same domain name should look consistent.
The other benefit of consistency is for brand recognition, ACME would
make their paper towels and soap look related, so if you like ACME's
soap you're more inclined towards buying also their paper towels instead
of their competitor's. Even then, some companies make some products
look totally unrelated so if the new product fails it doesn't hurt their
other products perception.
I don't think we need brand consistency since we don't have a central
authority to respond to, the only thing we have in common is haskell, we
even have several implementations, and we may as well have several
projects doing the same thing in different ways in our quest for the
best.
Some people may even look for consistency with different things, someone may try to mimic the design on linked.in for a strictly job-board like website, or google's for a haskell search engine ( hehe :)
In some other places, consistency may be downright harmful and get you
confused about the site you're on. It's like those projects who keep
their documentation in 'trac's default theme and you don't know right
away what you're looking at or where you saw that snippet you need to
use again. Local user group's sites are another example, every local
user group has their own personality, and if consistent, we'll end up
with a lot of sites that look confusing and boringly similar.
I think we should rather err on the side of accepting much needed
contributions, and leaving it up to each developer to evaluate their
project's affinity with other projects in the community to mimic their
color scheme and even their layout as they see fit. Access to graphics
sources would be of great help for this.
All in all, I think design inconsistency makes it look friendlier for
people to contribute and shows the diversity we have in the haskell
community. Both are among the main reasons communities like ruby's and
python's became so widespread.
Cheers!
----nubis :)