It was challenging to think of what graphics to use for Server - I wanted to explore a few different options. I liked the idea of potential users working from their home lab or small business. I came up with some abstract options, such as a notebook and pen, that represent the ideas and plans the user might have. Below is that idea visualized:
With the last two graphics made for the editions being 3D renders - I thought this would be a great opportunity for another. @mowest sent me a variety of different images of home servers. I decided to use this one:
For this section, I got information from @mowest on what the Server working group (WG) would like that section to read. The WG wanted to go for icons / images alongside the features, like the Workstation page has. @nika was able to pull screenshots for the first two points. For the last three, I created icons following requests from the Server WG.
This section appears across all the edition pages and reflects the relevant information / what was available on the docs page for the Fedora Server WG.
I absolutely love that server render and I think (from a branding / design perspective) that is the way to go. I am curious to see what the Server WG thinks.
The notebook & mindmap composition is really nice too though! We should definitely extract that and save it somewhere for future projects so we can use it regardless if it ultimately gets used on the server pages. (Maybe a new “illustrations” repo under Media Assets · GitLab ?)
For the graphics corresponding to the features in the last mockups… I think they’re great conceptually (and some of those are super difficult to conceptualize so well done!) I might poke / iterate on the grey ones on the bottom just so they don’t stick out from the screenshots? Or maybe consider giving them a different color background or something? Or changing the order so the screenshots are interwoven with the grey illustrations? Not sure.
My only slight nitpick is wondering about the ‘latest technologies’ but NFS and virtual machines aren’t really that new. Not sure how to rename it… proven technologies?
First of all: many thanks. That’s great work and I like it a lot! You managed to take the ideas and wishes that were discussed in the WG and implement them graphically in an excellent way. And as the person who organizes and moderates our discussions, I should have a pretty good overview (I hope )
And as usually, an excellent meal gives you more appetite. So some (minor) wishes (it’s really fine-tuning on an already impressive level).
In the server hero, we have currently “Download” and “Community”. I would like to have “Documentation” there as well (with a link to Fedora Server Documentation :: Fedora Docs)
Same for the blue header bar (on all get-fedora pages). There should be a direct link to the Fedora docs homepage (Fedora Documentation :: Fedora Docs) as well (even if the design now looks very quirky and may soon need ‘a little’ maintenance). “Technically elegant, documentation miserable/missing” is the most common criticism of Fedora. Now that we have an active Docs team again, we should promote it in a prominent position.
If you continuously narrow the width of the view port, there are always spots where parts of the text run out of the red field on the right and “disappear” before the entire text then wraps around again. This is a petitesse, but it would be nice if it could be optimized. It’s especially noticeable in macOS Safari, which displays everything a bit larger from the start (I know, Safari has been a problem again for some time).
Regarding Kevin’s comment about “Latest Technology”, I think our idea can be best described by “Proven and latest technology united at your disposition” (perhaps in a less “Germanized” phrasing). Both “united” as well as “your disposition” are significant.
Referring to a recent discussion of Red Hat’s public description of Fedora (test bed for RHEL), it would be good to expand the “stable ecosystem” point to “stable yet state-of-the-art ecosystem”
“Attend a meeting”, we are to be to adjust our meeting time to 17:00 during summer time period, I guess.
Last but not least, after all the huge progress, it would be nice if the Fedora Server logo (the three orange “Lego bricks”) would become more expressive (maybe we have already one as on getfedora Editions page).
Thanks for the feedback! I’ll add that screenshot into the repo you mentioned
For the graphics corresponding to the features in the last mockups… I think they’re great conceptually (and some of those are super difficult to conceptualize so well done!) I might poke / iterate on the grey ones on the bottom just so they don’t stick out from the screenshots? Or maybe consider giving them a different color background or something? Or changing the order so the screenshots are interwoven with the grey illustrations? Not sure.
I get what you mean about being cohesive with the screenshots! I will play around with it a bit more to see if I can get them to flow better.
Might be that “Latest Opensource Technology” sounds more correct.
Giving honor to Podman, Libvirt also Btrfs.
Instaed of NFS & SMB put Btrfs above the block of Podman?!
Nice job. I really like the new color scheme. Here’s my feedback:
Maybe for the Hero image you can create a breadcrumb / carousel and have it rotate between the two images every few seconds.
Use a new screenshot of Cockpit without the arrow.
“Latest Technologies” feels odd with Podman having colored text and a logo and the other 2 blocks are just grey text.
Since Podman is a specific technology stack, maybe the other 2 can be more specific items too. Things like LibVirt, NextCloud, Nginx, Unbound, or NodeJS.
We could also make the screenshots a circle, similar to how we did on the workstation page?
Yah, of course, would something like this be what you’re thinking @nikodunk? I tried to make the illustrations more cohesive with the screenshots as suggested by @duffy by swapped the points around to have them integrated. I also put them in a circle gradient to style them a bit more.
Let me know what you think! For the updated screenshot @pboy could you send it into the Web and Apps team matrix chat at https://matrix.to/#/#websites:fedoraproject.org or even just upload it here in a comment thanks for the help!
As @mowest already stated, the graphic matches our discussion in the WG very well. Our intention is to focus on the object server, possibly also on the range home lab - SME - data center. The graphics resembles a standalone server as well as several servers in a standalone rack.
I don’t know if my “internal translator” got that right. Is it an idea to make the hero graphics dynamic, alternating with the notebook graphics? Isn’t that a bit vintage?
(besides the somewhat vague reference to “server”) And the graphic quickly slides out of the viewport as the user scrolls to content further down.
And regarding the graphic at “Latest Technology”, the text “Virtual Machines” could be replaced by the libvirt logo. For NFS&SMB, there is unfortunately nothing, but you could add a 4th box and put the Wildfly logo there, colorful and also a core service in Fedora Server.
And regarding the text to “Platform”, please omit the word “future”.
I feel like the wording around the “Platform” section doesn’t feel right. Since part of the goal is to highlight how Fedora Server supports newer and emerging technologies, I think the Raspberry Pi needs to be mentioned somewhere on the page or in the platform section. For example it could say something along the lines of “From the Data Center to your raspberry pi…” or whatever.
@alys had some great thoughts about “Platform”. My original wording was trying to create a touch point with the audiences that Server WG is trying to serve including: Small to Medium Businesses, Home Lab hobbyists, and test environments for enterprise work loads. Perhaps your phrase “From the Data Center to your raspberry pi…” does a better job helping to make those audiences see Fedora Server as a great platform to deploy for their server needs.
@pboy has been a member of Server WG a lot longer than I have been (I’m the new kid on the block) so he has some great thoughts from his experience with the Server WG and has a good read on our WG’s goals and plans.
I agree with the comments about “Latest Technologies” it probably needs some work. My main goal with this section is the bring out the fact that since Fedora Server is built on the work of the Fedora Community we often have “close to current versions” or the “latest versions” of the software stacks that often run on Fedora Server, it wasn’t just about trying to find the “newest technologies”. This is why I included NFS and SMB, not “new” technologies, but Fedora has the “latest” or “more recent” versions of these server apps that are common use cases for Fedora Server. But I love the idea of replacing NFS and SMB with something that matches more with the style of the nice Podman logo and having other styled logos on those bricks would look nice. The “description” text for “Latest Technologies” could include links to those projects or apps as well.
Thanks to everyone who took the time to give feedback about the Fedora Server page revamp. It has been a privilege for me to work with the incredible designers who are working so hard to freshen up our Fedora website properties. I’m excited to see the feedback and engagement about the Server page here on discussion.fedoraproject.org.
I know @mowest mentioned adding in the links to the description text for Latest Technologies, but I was wondering was that links to NFS and SMB? I know libvert, podman and cockpit are already linked.
Perhaps the easiest would be to eliminate the block with NFS and SMB since we don’t have nice Logo graphics that match the style of the other blocks. We could change the wording to something like:
Latest Technologies
Run virtual machines and containers with libvirt and podman or build amazing applications on top of the WildFly application runtime.
I like this change, since “File Server” is mentioned under “Stable Ecosystem”, and the common technologies that would be used for a file server would be NFS and SMB. Cockpit is mentioned by itself later on the page as well. I think this change would reflect some of the other excellent feedback we have had for the new site. Others are welcome to tweak my wording choices.
Cockpit logo looks nice. With this app we can config the NFS and probably also SMB.
For this I would insist on the word opensource i the “Latest opensource technologies”.
Fedora is known to deliver just using opensource
Perhaps this could fit into the byline under Latest Technologies. I think it is also worth calling out that we are providing some of the latest and greatest Open Source[1] technology, but “Latest Open Source Technologies” feels lengthy for the header. So, it could more easily fit into the byline.
Here is one possible option:
Run virtual machines and containers with the latest Open Source tools like libvirt and podman, managed through Cockpit.
I have a nitpick that if we are describing technology that uses Open Source Initiative-approved licenses, Open Source should be written as two, unhyphenated words with capitalized letters. It is a proper noun and pays homage to the Open Source Definition maintained by the Open Source Initiative. ↩︎
