Comment by no_time
8 months ago
Looks like the website of a startup that wants my email so they can "get back to me with a quote".
Such soulless corpo design is not befitting of a project this nice.
8 months ago
Looks like the website of a startup that wants my email so they can "get back to me with a quote".
Such soulless corpo design is not befitting of a project this nice.
I had a similar first impression. The previous logo and branding were pretty strong imo even if the SerenityOS and ladybird website was/is a bit scrappy. Very cute little ladybird, and the natural patterns of a ladybug gave a clear visual motif to build from.
People talk about 'polish' in design as a signifier of quality but my mind always goes to conching, the process by which cacao nibs are ground down over days to produce silky chocolate. You need to conch the nibs to grind them past the point that the chocolate has a gritty texture in order to get the nice smooth chocolate we all love, but what the process also does is grind down the sharper notes of the flavour. The further you go the more the deeper and richer notes are lost. So too a design language and brand can be conched to smooth it out for broader consumption, but you can go too far and lose the flavour.
The new logo's shape and colours look reminiscent of Helix's https://helix-editor.com, but I agree that the actual ladybird was nice.
I do like to add raw cacao nibs to my chocolate cakes and I also prefer the old web over much of the offensively inoffensive corportate approved web so maybe there is something to your analogy.
The AI-generated laptop images with incoherent logo and keys are the cherry on the soullessness.
The old website of this project is worth checking: https://web.archive.org/web/20240630172605/https://ladybird....
Thanks for posting this. I have to admit, the old design has a lot more charm. The new design is fine, but there is just something timeless about the old design
> This page is not fancy because we are focusing on building the browser. :^)
I approve this message
I sorry to say this, but the new visual style is completely charmless. The most important thing a non-profit oss project needs is a charming visual style. A ladybird for instance is an extremely charming little bug, and it was such a strong choice. This new style is a huge step back compared to it.
there is no bug called ladybird, you mean ladybug..
Ladybird is British English, ladybug is American English.
The ladybug is a beetle and not a bug :)
My first impression was the same. Another VC-backed SaaS vibes.
I was about to say that it had a reason to look like ass in that they never really worked on it at all to begin with, being focused on the browser, which wasn't even good enough for anything more than dev work, rather than the presentation of it.
But I see now that they actually updated the site.