I'm Kurtis, a new product designer at Stack Exchange. First off, congratulations, your site is beginning the process of moving out of beta to a fully-graduated site!
Graduation and Your Site Design
Graduation comes with a few perks. We have already begun work on your site's design, which will give you your own unique theme that reflects your topic and culture. This will help brand your site as unique, even while you share common elements with other sites that show you are part of a bigger Stack Exchange family.
Once the design goes up, you will receive a link in the footer of other sites in the network, along with the ability to migrate content to and from other sites — and the notoriety of a public launch that says, "Congratulations, you finally made it!"
Design Concept
As we did research for the site, we found recurring themes in the questions that helped us in the overall design direction. One was the question of "can you help me identify this movie or show?" and the other theme had to do with the question of the creator's intended meaning to a scene, plot point, or creative direction. We wanted to capture the spirit of this intrigue in the design. Enter Saul Bass...
Saul Bass (and friends) movie poster mood board
Saul Bass is known for his genius ability to take a production and distill its essence into a simple movie poster image or title sequence. His work has been inspiring designers like Ollie Moss to design minimalistic movie posters for the past 40 years. We wanted to capture the grit and impact of these movie poster in the design. And since the site topic covers both movies and TV, we created a filmstrip of illustrations representing scenes from the wide range of shows and films discussed on the site.
Illustrations
In the illustrations we wanted to capture memorable moments from various genres of movies and TV shows. The scenes needed to be so iconic that they were recognizable at a small size. We've got a good start here, but are looking for the community's suggestions on a few additions. Here's where you can help us—What are some memorable iconic movie or tv scenes that we should add? We're looking for a range that spans the popular to the more obscure.
These scenes are a nod to the "can you identify this movie or show?" questions. By the way, can you identify the movies and TV shows in the image above?
Color Scheme
The color scheme has a retro vibe with a touch of "digitally remastered to it's original optical vibrance." We used red as the dominant color because of it's association with movies, but also because it represents the passion of the human experience so often captured in television and film.
Logo
Because the site covers the topics of both movies and television shows, we wanted to use a non-medium specific icon. The logo also needed to be scalable to small sizes. We landed on a single piece of popcorn. While popcorn is a favorite snack for movie-goers and couch potatoes, the icon also represents one small moment in the bucket. It is the single frame of film, or that one scene or memorable character.
The style of the graphic is minimalist, unique, and clean (with just a touch of grit.) It is a merging of modern and retro styles.
We matched the rounded popcorn icon up with a strong, bold font, and we think the juxtaposition of organic beside geometric shapes works nicely. The popcorn also plays the part of an ampersand in the logo.
The circle around the logo represents a spotlight.
Swag
Overall Site Design
Please click to see full-resolution version.
We believe the design captures the mood we were going for and would love to hear your feedback. If there are no major design changes, we're hoping to launch the site soon!
Thank you for for making this such a great community!
EDIT
Thank you for all of your input. We've made some changes based on the community's initial feedback.
Logo
There were enough people who weren't in love with the logo execution of the single piece of popcorn that we decided to revisit the design. We know that we won't be able to please everyone, but at the same time, we want you to feel good about the site and the community you've worked to build.
We explored a few different directions and landed on the execution below for the following reasons:
- A box of popcorn is much more recognizable than the single piece.
- This concept still focuses on the consumption side of movies and TV shows.
- It works as a standalone icon and will scale to a small size.
- It's fun.
T-shirt
It seems everyone like the illustrations (and we do too.) so we've updated the T-shirt design to include them. We will update which snapshots are included once we've completed them.
illustrations
So many suggested snapshots on the community wiki! The hard part will be narrowing things down. We'll do our best to create a balance between genres as we finish all of the site assets and work toward launching the site in the very near future!