There is a distinct 'anti-corporate' sort of feeling within this community and my suspicions are that this debate has more to do with that than it does good design...
I'm going to take exception with this comment because I don't think it's true ... most of the folks participating in this thread make at least part of their living off OpenACS, while a few of us make their entire living off OpenACS-related work. Most of the participants are involved with consulting companies each of which have talked about the importance of evangelism/marketing.
One thing that's happening, though, is that the issues of site content and navigation design are getting tossed into this thread, which started as a discussion about a graphic design.
Content and navigation issues can be discussed separately. The balance between marketing-oriented front-page content and developer-oriented front-page content can be discussed later.
As far as our hasty decision to base work on #3, this was in the context of 1) Daveb talking about presenting a modification of the banner for #3 which incorporates some of the simplicity (for lack of a better word) of Carl's banner idea 2) Jun talking about working with the artist to reduce the impact of the big yellow portion of the banner in ways that are somewhat similar to #1. Later Carl talked about adding some of the color elements of #3 to his design (several people commented that they like the thin yellow lines offsetting the blue headers in the table boxes but not the top banner).
So in practice we're talking about a convergence of ideas and two designs.
Jun's talking about getting the designs cast in ADP as a practical matter so we can look towards getting the site built with a new design. InfiniteInfo has talked about doing this piece of work based on #3. We can still fiddle with graphic elements afterwards. Jun's just saying "let's work forward from a design that's already cast into ADPs" not "let's freeze the graphic elements".
There's a difference, folks.
Lastly let's step back and try to keep this from being a "Carl wins" or "InfiniteInfo wins" scenario. As was pointed out above, we're all winning because both designs are better than the current design and both are better than the Musea design. Now I've probably pissed of Musea but the reality is that there wasn't this level of feedbac when they proposed it and if there were, they'd have responded and moved forward, too.
At the end of this I prospose we credit Musea, Infinite Info, and Carl for all having worked hard at graphic design and for all having contributed to the final result.
At some point we need to move forward, folks. Whichever design we pick can be thrown out and replaced later, too, this isn't a lifelong design freeze we're talking about. Let's keep things in perspective!
