New Website design is terrible. Discuss here

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Discussion started here but this needs community feedback.

As someone with many years of design experience, I can attest that the design is not good. It’s sterile, unimaginative and lacks the humanity necessary to connect people on an emotional level with the benefits that the underlying technology provides.

Unfortunately the job appears complete. It’s clear that the Cardano foundation lacks the human resources necessary to facilitate the branding and graphic design aspects of the project.

As VERY early adopter and supporter of Cardano, I strongly urge the foundation to reconsider their design team and approach. So far the results are terrible.

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Thank you for raising CardanoMax. like you, I don’t wish to criticise Cardano, I have been involved with ADA since 2017 and loving seeing the project move forward now on so many levels.
On a personal level I have successfully worked in Sales/Marketing for most of my working life and think this latest iteration, sadly in my view, is at best just bland (it’s not the worst ever, in my opinion just needs revisiting asap).
My thoughts are that it’s been designed/written by techy people for techy people (all great, but we need to be front facing easy to connect to, with supporting more technical information available after someone has chosen to go a bit deeper into a website i am not saying this is the best example but illustrates my point https://www.nimiq.com/ )
Optimistically i trust Cardano will adapt/change it; I have replied to your comment in the hope the powers that be listen and the community can offer their comment. Some of the more active YOUTUBERS have been voicing similar comments for the last few days.
I appreciate Cardano/ADA/IOHK etc have many other challenges right now, but would urge that someone carry out some market research and look around at some of the newer projects out there that just look so much better.
Our website is our opportunity to inform, inspire and attract, it’s important that technically we are sound and we need to connect with everyone ‘technical’ and ‘non technical’
I welcome feedback
Regards
MachTwo.

ps examples of a few more that i think look and interact quite well https://www.energyweb.org/
https://swissborg.com/

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Excellently stated. I am not diplomatic and I understand my style is abrasive.

I am a long term Cardano believer. I’m not here to make a quick buck off of crypto. I believe in CH’s vision and I want Cardano to succeed which is why I am passionate about the design of the front facing websites that are people’s first and primary impression of the project. Even more so, it’s what will turn them into long term customers/users as well.

Most people don’t really understand the importance of proper design especially as it relates to this field. Design, user interface design, lead funneling, marketing, back-end systems all have to work together. The website creates the first impression of Cardano. If the website is unattractive and confusing, that will be what people think of Cardano.

I really hope the powers that be understand how important this is and how bad the new sites are. Even the copy-writing is bad. It needs to speak to people as if they’ve never even heard about cryptocurrency and blockchain before.

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Like dentists agreeing on toothpaste; I love the “9 out of 10 web designers agree” sentiments above… A clear example of the usual creative inbreeding. This is why the web all looks the same, thanks to WordPress, stock images of humans that have nothing to do with the company / product inserted into pages, and designers that can’t think outside of the box that they’ve built for themselves.

I dig the new site. Simple, no useless smiling faces that take up real estate… @Cardano - Ignore the creatively incestuous Star Bellied Sneetches above that think they know what they’re talking about.

Cardano is next generation, the critics above are not.

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Lol. Found the McCann shill.

Yes, ignore the professionals who study design and understand human behavior on websites. Ignore the years of research, analytics, eye movement tracking, conversion tracking that prove what separates effectively designed websites from those that aren’t.

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Oh the pious…

McCann as in McCann Erickson? I remember that name from years ago when I had Ad agency clients in LA. - Sorry. Not from a rival agency. Nice try Donny Deutsch. Just take the criticism and evolve.

RE: “eye movement tracking, conversion tracking that prove what separates effectively designed websites from those that aren’t.”

The “new site” isn’t an eCommerce site you goofball… It’s about providing pertinent information. Stock images of smiley faces may make your analytics look better, but serve no purpose. This from a ‘data guy’…

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Although the website is complete as far as consolidating information and without going to deep into the fonts, sizes, color choice and their reader interaction, page layouts and literny of other design considerations etc… as aesthetics play just as an important role as content for reader retention… has anyone in the dev team given at least any thought to the psycology of color?

At least they have excluded google ads. :slight_smile:

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Take the criticism?? Lol . You haven’t offered anything of substance. You can’t even refute my criticisms.

You keep bringing up “stock” images like you know what you’re talking about. No one asked for stock images. If fact, I mentioned featuring the people behind Cardano because featuring the people behind blockchain projects is very important to building trust and community. Just the opposite of “stock” images.

You’re a troll who is obviously connected in some way to the designer of the site. You haven’t offered anything to refute my points.

Bye troll.

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Dear Genius,

I’m not “connected in some way to the designer of the site”. After stumbling upon this post and glancing at your sentiments I took my 30 years of experience and commented, that’s it… Again, the Cardano site is informational and “the shoe fits”. Criticizing the new site by citing metrics like “conversion tracking” (which doesn’t matter in this context) shines a glaring light on a person that simply wants to bloviate about their expertise.

Ex: “As VERY early adopter and supporter of Cardano, I strongly urge the foundation to reconsider their design team and approach.”

Who are you? Because you’re an “early adopter” your opinion matters more than the design agency that did the site?

If I’m a “troll”, you’re an “ego maniac”.

Thanks for the laughs and have a nice day Einstein.

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Why when there is a criticism about something, does it turn in to a passionate, strawman ego based argument.

Previously I felt my opinion was completely worthless on the topic, because CF seemed so adamant about how amazing their new website was, and any criticism seemed to get fairly quickly attacked or brushed under the carpet as in this thread. At one point you risked getting banned if you talked about it in the telegram channel.

Granted: most of the critiques were not detailed or were about graphic design (subjective) which is hard to act upon, but my critique is about the arrangement of content and the written content itself.
My opinion is probably still worthless on the topic, but I am a little reinvigorated by my dealings with the community most recently regarding my opinions on the Cardano Foundation. So I have a bit more hope that eventually some of my/community opinions regarding the website might get listened to in the future.

Personally I think the website is not good enough RELATIVE to the amount of money given to McCann to do it. I don’t know how much that was, but basically any amount was too much in my opinion. A lot of what I consider the great content was not made by McCann.
I believe some kind of community competition or community collaboration would have produced something better or at least of equal quality and cheaper. It could have been voted on. Doing that would have been more in line with Cardano ‘values’ in my opinion. Outsourcing to some (maybe big) marketing corporation not related to Cardano, was a fail in itself in my opinion.

Reading McCann corporate spiel is cringe worthy for me: https://mccanndublin.com/work/project-renovare/
“We undertook extensive brand planning to understand one of the most complex technological platforms present globally.”
"We reappraised and rebuilt the Cardano brand model; defining the purpose, position, values, behaviours, and proposition. Giving a sense of internal direction to the brand and product itself. "

Do they not realise that all they noticeably achieved was make a website, and some graphic design (which personally I don’t like very much). Is it really that incredible. Is it really that difficult to create a reasonable website that already had great content that just needed to be organised. These question are rhetorical because I think the answers are no. Personally I wouldn’t want to be associated with this company.

But just saying criticism, without solution or suggestion, doesn’t help.

###############################################################
So here are some of my amateur assessments about improving the website should any one be interested or want to do something about it in the future.

  • I’m pretty sure someone wrote something detailed like this in a reddit thread but I can’t find it. I would like to post it here and any other relevant critiques.
  • NicName raises good points here that are completely unaddressed: New Cardano website is now live
    Here in lies the problem of Cardano Foundation in my opinion - they seem disconnected and uninterested in negative community feedback: as detailed here : What is Cardano Foundations output? What do you do

I’m looking at the website as if I am a new investor doing due-dilligence.
As a potential investor I google Cardano. The first thing that comes up is the website.

(1)
The front page says:
“Making The World Work Better For All”
“Cardano is a blockchain platform for changemakers”
“Our World Is Changing. Together, We Can Change It For The Better.”
“A History Of Impossible, Made Possible”
“Define Your Possible. Change Your World.”
“We have changed science. We have changed what it means to build global systems and sustainable models of exchange and governance.” (You haven’t changed science :wink: :smiley: )
“We, alongside our community and partners, are defining a new future: a decentralized future without intermediaries, in which power is returned to the individual.” (Actually CF you don’t listen to the individual or community opinion)

Maybe people are impressed by these words?
But to me, this is wordy nonsense with no content, typical of the current paradigm in a corporate marketing team that knows nothing technical. At least “We have changed science.” gave me a laugh.
As an investor, I skip through all of it trying to find some useful information. This starts to make me feel slightly negative towards investing in Cardano.
The one comment that does have content, specifically “Cardano is the first blockchain platform to be built through peer-reviewed research”, I glanced over so quickly that my mind ignored it because I’m starting to ignore the many unsubstantiated comments alongside that: “to be secure enough to protect the data of billions, scalable enough to accommodate global systems, and robust enough to support foundational change.”

I won’t post every critique on every sentence, because I believe I made my point

As an alternative to the above, please see here : https://roadmap.cardano.org/en/ What is cardano blurb has content, and not just fancy words.

(2) NEWS at the bottom:
August 4th “Cardano elevates its branding” is the latest news…
What about Shelley 2.0 release. Branding is the most important thing Cardano has to offer? As an investor i’m starting to become uninterested.
Travesty.

(3) Partners:
I click on partners and it doesn’t refer me to IOHK’s or Emurgos much more superior websites and teams. It’s a wordy blurb for each of them instead. Please give a link to the website of these companies. Crazy.

(4) The forum is reasonable, but it would be good to see a link of the many other mediums where information is posted. IOHK youtube, Charles’ youtube…

So the front page is a complete disappointment in regards to content in my opinion. I also don’t like the graphics but that’s personal preference and relatively unimportant in my opinion.

(5) Moving on TO DROP DOWN MENUS:

  • I don’t see any ‘team’ on here and that is the one of the first things an investor will look at. Why the hell is IOHK’s and Emurgos extensive amazing teams not promoted here on the website. The reality is that these teams ARE Cardano, but they aren’t really represented as it.

  • Developers/individuals/enterprise/discovercardano/journey. All very odd names of categories and the content contained within them does not strictly relate to the category. Disconcerting again.

  • Developers dropdowns:
    CARDANO DOCS: It’s good. I like the arrangement. It is for developers.
    CARDANO ROADMAP: Is so good. This should not be hidden away in a drop down menu for developers. This should be on the front page one of the first things we read. The blurb ‘what is Cardano’ has content unlike everything on the front page. Put that on the front page - it’s impressive to me.
    Every one of those developer dropdowns is high quality. Cardano docs which is the first one and takes the most space is actually the least detailed and most basic.

  • Individuals dropdowns:
    WHAT IS ADA, STAKE DELEGATION. DAEDELUS/YOROI WALLET. Good. Explanations of the basics should have links on the front page!!! Isn’t this obvious? Not hidden in a drop down menu titled ‘individuals’ and cluttered with other useless links like DISCOVER CARDANO.

DISCOVER CARDANO is too much corporate blurb with limited substantiated content like the front page. In fact this could replace the front page - it’s basically the same but at least it has links to other useful pages which should be on the front page. “Purpose,Opportunity”. Next to the blurb a graphic of a person with their fist in the air, that looks like it got pulled from clip art. Painful to read and a waste of my time. I guess this is what McCann bring to the table.
I would delete this whole page of useless no information.

  • ENTERPRISE is fine. But very strange title, implying this information isn’t for the individual investor.

  • DISCOVER CARDANO. The worst page of them all gets it’s own drop down menu as well as being contained in the ‘Individuals’ drop down menu. Comedically, this drop down menu links to each 4 paragraphs of that discover cardano page. This is such a big design oversight. Did a professional company really get paid to create this website? Did any one check the website thoroughly before release? Really really crazy. Please just delete this dropdown menu completely. Or replace it with CARDANO ROADMAP!

Hidden last on that menu after the links to each paragraph of the DISCOVER CARDANO page is OUROBORUS. A very important aspect of Cardano showing content. So sooo strange.

  • JOURNEY: What has explorer, research and development updates got to do with ‘journey’. Just put Cardano Roadmap with it’s own link. Explorer, research and development updates are already contained within ‘developers’ menu. Why are they repeated.

In summation. I really don’t understand how any one who went through the whole website could honestly say it was well designed. (If design means organisation and not just graphic design)
There is good content there but it’s arranged completely haphazardly.
On the bright side. It wouldn’t take long to arrange it, and not much would need to change to improve the website vastly.

Please at least delete the Discover Cardano drop down menu, or ideally the whole page. That in itself would make the site significantly better.
And then consider dropping the blurbs on the front page and replacing it with the pages WHAT IS ADA, STAKE DELEGATION. DAEDELUS/YOROI WALLET and CARDANO ROADMAP as links.

Cont…
I’ve only just noticed the tiny unbold font " I want to… DEVELOP, GOVERN, OPERATE, DISCOVER ADA" on the front page. Who is going to come on the website and go “yes I want to govern! click!” Are we expecting the Nigerian prime minister specifically for this section.
Or maybe a Surgeon will frequent the page and go “yes, I want to operate!, click”

‘Develop’ links to Cardano docs. Ok. But you already have a dropdown for developers containing all of the information for developers so you don’t need one link to the weakest page.

‘Govern’ doesn’t seem to have a drop down link, so if you miss the tiny font here you miss it completely ,and it’s actually important content about Voltaire. It should be more clear on the front page alongside WHAT IS ADA, STAKE DELEGATION. DAEDELUS/YOROI WALLET and CARDANO ROADMAP.

‘Operate’ seems to link to another stake pool delegation page very similar to the stake pool operation page. Those pages should be combined.

‘Discover ada’ links to WHAT IS ADA and is in the drop down menu. But I agree it should also be on the front page in MUCH MUCH bigger font.

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Fully agree. The messages of the vision, achievements (they invented solved a bunch of things that were not imagined before) in some simple and compact ways are not presented at all, but seems like bullsh*t marketings with no real messages. The achievements IOG did are tremendous, but when I open the CF’s main page no any sign of any of them.

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I just looked at the website again and the discover Cardano drop down menu has disappeared :smiley:
Well at least something was achieved.

But note, in doing so you now removed the OUROBORUS page.

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Hi there, I just wanted to say that the new website is pretty cool and has a good colors combinations. Overall a very good base to keep on with the brand evolution.

Sorry CardanoMax but you are just complaining without any solution… you dont explain why is steril and so on for you… Design is like developping…job is never finished and perfection doesnt exist.

If you give more information or you could explain better your point of view…because steril for you could be pure and clean for me (Apple is kinda steril but it works)… unimaginative could be friendly or easy to digest… just be more precisse instead using abstract ideas of design and you should know what Cardano wants to transmit before making this kind of statements.

Happy to discuss with you in a productive way… I would say for example that CARDANO “logo” is not coherent because they are using differents typos, sometimes in uppercase, sometimes as “Title”… so is not coherent.
I am against narrow typos for this kind of market because is more difficult to read and less modern…
Icons are almost 100% coherent but still we could improve some of them.
Big inconsistency in aligments…

Definitely there are mistakes and improvements to do but it is positive change overall and cheers for the design team which surely they are working hard. Surely with a couple of CSS changes and a definitive and strong Brand guide manual would help A LOT!

Chers!

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I’m also not a big fan of the design, but that’s OK, this is more related to personal taste. Lucky’s gripes, which I share for the most part, are with the contents and the way they are presented and ordered. I just took a look at the polkadot homepage since this seems to be the latest hype. Not saying it’s perfect, but at least they immidiatelly give me a good idea what the project is about and the navigation is pretty straightforward. Also it’s much more performant on mobile, the cardano page loads some icons and pictures with a delay.
Another example is the ethereum homepage. Again, one can argue about the style, but at least it’s unique. The information is well structured and it’s easy to find the information your looking for. I think it’s hard to argue that the Cardano page is better than either of these two.

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You are speaking about UX and UI and I totally agree with you.

In the other hand Ethereum website and speaking about just graphics and aesthetical… they are in another level because they are using illustration from an artist which pops straight, I love it. BUT their combination of colors is just wrong.

Polkadot is simplier and more clear… Nothing to say about.

Taking a look again to the old cardano web and the new one… I think they changed it drastically and it is difficult to diggest if they dont apply changes everywhere because there is a huge gap of coherence between cardano.org, cardanofoundation.org and other sections such as testnets.cardano.org or roadmap.cardano.org… is messy

There is still a long way to go but I insist it was a good change for start but they should focus and develop more their visual communication.

CardanoMax is not totally wrong, just over reacting or exaggerated.

I saw that McCann Dublin did the job… I think Cardano did not apply properly the manual and in addition I have to say that McCann did not a good job… they are too classical for this “new market”… I could find better art direction and graphics in Freepik.

They should have an inhouse brand team instead calling external companies who doesnt understand the project… Marketing is part of communication and not the other way around… Marketing department has not idea about art direction or branding.

Finally I have to agree with CardanoMax and be totally agree with Lucky indeed…

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I just took a look at the old website, through the way back machine since I wasn’t too sure how it used to look.

And both, from UI/UX and design persepective I liked it a lot more. I think they had a good basis with that which just needed to be improved here and there.

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It’s not just the awful website… the McCann rebrand has been responsible for damaging the brand across ALL media and all communications. I alerted the community to this in June on the Cardano official forum on Facebook when seeing the McCann ‘design teasers’ released just before the Virtual Summit. I then did another critical piece when I saw the appalling graphic info sheet for delegating ADA [see attachment] which was sent out 10,000+ people on the Cardano mailing list (All those who had registered for the Virtual Summit).

I got called out as a FUDster, an alarmist, a wanabe attention seeker and an amateur who had no idea of what he was talking about even though I’ve spent my life as a graphic designer, art director and having worked on corporate and blue chip projects.

I’ve warned the community that the McCann rebrand has to be reverse engineered immediately to avoid the same mistakes being made for Goguen. This is a critical moment for Cardano and the warning must not be ignored or all the amazing science under the hood will be wasted if another car-crash like the McCann rebrand is allowed to happen.

Goguen is the trump card moment for Cardano and brand harmony must be forged across all media and from all the stakeholders including IOHK, Emurgo, Dadaelus, Cardano Foundation and clear guidance must be steered by a global brand specialist.

What we have at the moment is a champion race horse being represented by a pile of steaming horse manure [Current McCann branding guidelines, supporting graphics and brand elements]. We urgently need unified, sleek, fresh and modern WEB 3.0 styling to be implemented across ALL brand channels and communications to the public.

The McCann rebranding is fundamentally flawed on so many levels and this demonstrates that both the decision makers and communicators responsible do not have a clue when it comes to brand iD, typography, clear communication, elegance through simplicity and the KIS (keep it simple) theory that underpins all respected contemporary global branding.

  1. The designs and logo across the rebrand are lazy, too complicated and uncrafted. The complexity and poor tint execution of the kinetic version of new logo means it cannot scale [all rookie mistakes].

  2. On the info sheet, the colours clash and are too dominant to let the text speak clearly. [rookie mistake]. Good design should be on a white background to let key elements ‘ping’ (check Apple design and Apple global branding to which Charles himself makes reference in one of his AMAs).

  3. The use of tint graduations inhibits the reading of the communication [rookie mistake].

  4. The white out text of the panels makes it hard to read [rookie mistake]. The panels are just a lazy way of highlighting and breaking up bullet points [rookie mistake].

  5. Typography is poor [rookie mistake].

  6. The supporting design elements lack elegance, sophistication and are clumsy and ‘immature’ when compared to our competitors…

I could go on but these are mistakes done by amateurs. Your pay your agency money to be your guardian against making these fundamental mistakes but McCann seem only to be fuelling the fire. Urgent action is needed to ensure the Goguen golden opportunity is not wasted as it was with Shelley.

Mcann Rebrand composite
Mcann Rebrand composite1780×1780 528 KB

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Yes I agree – this is highly ironic when compared to the reult and execution of their work… the brand has been thrown in to the Stone Age and is about as far from gound breaking fresh NEXT GEN Web 3.0 design as you can get… it remeinds me of poorly exectuted 1980s design when computers were first being used in the work place and non-designers had just discovered they could put together pages without a designer and use tints, panels and graduations to ‘pretty up’ their layouts… this HAS to be called out as the worst case of ‘Post rationalisation bullshit’ in the history of Design, Global Branding and Marketing.

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