I am working on a rebrand for Darktable đŸŒ»

Software darktable
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Appreciate the feedback on the designs so far!

Not to complicate the topic of a rebrand, but I thought I’d take a minute to step back and formalize some thoughts on progress with a rebrand. Since these are big projects that need a solid vision.

:construction: But - work in progress! Practice project! :construction:

Goals of Darktable redesign

1. Make a great first impression :eyes:

  • Logo, app icon, website homepage. Where users first experience Darktable.

Intended feel: Appealing, complex made simple, professional, technical, artistic. Modern and carefully built.

2. Formalize branding systems (Color, Typography, Icons, etc.)

  • Branding choices built from ‘simple derivable logic’, not arbitrary aesthetics
  • Must accommodate user choices and accessibility
  • Maintain good contrast, communicate meaning via differences
  • function is form, efficiency is aesthetically pleasing

3. Deep consistency across branding content

Formalize, codify and implement: Color, typography, shape, layout, icon systems

  • Codify design guidelines into Darktable docs
  • Create mockups of what changes will take place, the intended final products
  • Provide design kits, enlist community to help with implementation (?)
  • ‘How to spot old content’
  • Extend branding decisions to app UI? Most branding is being careful of not disrupting the actual app itself

Concerns

Again, practice project. None of this has to be used! :construction: But I would love it if it was.

Who would have the final say of ‘yes lets do this’? I am curious as to how open source projects make big decisions like this - without falling into ‘design by committee’ where a team of users cannot see an objectively perfect choice.

Since design is quite political (literally, design systems are in sense policy, with a vision/goal and proceeding ruleset) — typical projects and teams will have a creative director who says ‘yes, lets go with this despite some of the team possibly disagreeing’.

Color system example

The below is an example of how I would build and codify a color system for Darktable. It uses background, content and color in three stages — using tone to set consistent contrast rules, allow indentation, hierarchical importance, and spot colors to set rules for accessibility like ‘skimmability’ of special communications.

darktable redesign 4
darktable redesign 44122×4480 860 KB

edits: adjustments to my color system, spelling

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Inspired by this topic I have been looking through the darktable website. I found, that the screenshots on the website, and especially here, are all pretty dated, some from the 2.x series, and some from 3.x.

Therefore my question to the expert: One difficulty to re-do those screenshots may be that the photographs used to do these screenshots are not available or hard to find. Would it therefore make sense to collect some (30 to 50) pictures (“donated” by the community but a balanced selection of topics (portrait, landscape, street, nature, architecture, macro, astro, 
) and suitable to demonstrate particular features of the software on them, and which would also fit the general design language of the website, documentation, and application?

Maybe this could be even done as a “community contest” (such as the inkscape about screen contests), maybe for every new “major” release (where the first digit counts up), so approx. every 3 years 


Disclaimer: Just some ideas, I will definitely not volunteer before my youngest child leaves primary school.

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This is the main reason I haven’t yet re-done the screenshots (the need to have quite a few images first). Perhaps a simpler solution would be to screenshot the darkroom view instead of the lighttable view.

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Yes I can code it into the website.

A content cleanup can happen separately. The content is completely separate from the theme. I would like to whittle down some content tho.

The icon and logo type, yous hope yes. @Pascal_Obry would have final say on that. The actual theme is there for technical reasons and I personally wouldn’t change it.

I don’t think we have a framework for this, but I have commit rights. Pascal has said that he liked the mockup. We will have to talk further. Usually the work just needs tone done :slight_smile:

The group here will happily provide opinions, as they already have, but you’re the designer and not all suggestions need to make it in.

Yeah we don’t have that :stuck_out_tongue:

Yes please

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Did these images ever get used? :slight_smile: Darktable 4.2 is coming, Simply Thank You - #42 by hannoschwalm

Not suggesting we don’t need more new ones, (and this is a slightly different topic) just wondering


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I think the new icon looks really nice, and I like the new font as well. A great update of the existing design; close enough to make it clear it’s the same application.

  • I would echo some of the earlier sentiments preferring the versions with subtler effects, or gentler gradients, both in the logo design, as well as the call to action button on the main page.

  • This is maybe a nit, but in the homepage views the primary nav buttons (along the top header) are difficult to read dependent on the photo used. The cloud background is much easier than the top-down beach background.

  • I agree that updated application screenshots should be a priority. I’m curious if people have thoughts about the main image being lighttable view or darkroom view. Looking through commercial RAW editor landing pages, having an editor view seems common. Advantages of lighttable seem to be that more photos can be represented (portrait, landscape, etc
), more varied colors, and styles. Advantages of the darkroom view would be highlighting specific editing tools, showing a split before/after comparison of a processed image, and showing the primary app screen (where people will likely spend the most time). I think additional screenshots would help demonstrate the wealth of features in darktable. I think the Rawtherapee homepage does a good job of this.

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No, we were waiting for someone to bother to submit a pull request and nobody did

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Sounds like the time is ripe :smiley:

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Thinking along these same lines, something I’ve wanted to do for awhile now is make an “elevator pitch” for why a photographer currently using another product (e.g. Lightroom) should switch to darktable. The unfamiliar interface, plethora of modules, and new workflow concept (scene-referred) can be intimidating to someone coming from another piece of software that does more for you automagically behind the scenes.

I was thinking of creating this as a single page on whydarktable.com or something like that, but given this potential for a redesign of darktable.org, I think the best place would actually be darktable.org/why.

I would be happy to write the content for this page if @rudantu would be able to make it look great (I’m not a graphic designer). Since it’s an “elevator pitch”, it should be easy-to-follow and really visually appealing to draw you in and convince you to give darktable a try. Then when I’m talking to other photographers about my workflow and darktable, I can easily refer them to this page to potentially convince them to try it. What do you think?

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Sounds good to me, I feel like it would be good to have a place for newcomers to get started, perhaps with an emphasis on using the ‘easier’ options (sigmoid for example) that behave in a way more familiar to those used to other software.

I’ve long felt that the complexity that darktable is often said to have is mostly just a lack of sufficiently obvious pointers at the most relevant options/modules/workflow.

I tried to give an easy starting point in this article here but it’s now slightly outdated, and to be honest a couple of my suggestions were slightly bad practice. I can be a bit too opinionated occasionally
 :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

But in any case something integrated into darktable.org would be best.

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Yes, and I think part of this page could include links to some easy “getting started” tutorials that people could follow along with using their own images to get their feet wet (e.g. I know @Bruce_Williams has some introductory videos in his channel, I have my text-based tutorial on getting started, etc). I think once you’re convinced that a piece of software is worth trying, the next thing you want to do is use it with your stuff (not digest the entire manual right away), so having this “elevator pitch” lead users to easy tutorials where they can get started right away with their own images (in a variety of learning formats - video, text, etc) would be good.

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Yes, speaking for myself, in the early days a few ‘easy successes’ can go a long way to easing the learning process. :slight_smile:
One could even have a small set of styles with instructions on downloading and using them, to give more options for beginners. I’d be happy to provide a few varied styles myself if it would be useful.

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Please beware that tutorials are often subjective and get out of date easily. Given the small number of maintainers for the website and user manual, such things are better as “opinion pieces” for want of a better term. Not that we won’t host them but I’d be wary of putting such content as “the official darktable way to do things”, but more “user X posted their workflow for darktable x.x.x here”.

That way we acknowledge that it is an opinion and has only been proven in a particular version, and don’t have to worry about subsequently maintaining it.

TBH pixls might be the best way to host such things.

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You could address that concern by associating any tutorial with the latest darktable release available when the tutorial was created. Then, when a new darktable release comes out, a new tab is added to the list of tutorials for the new release and tutorials by default stay pinned with the release where they were created, until the creator comes along and updates them for the latest release:
image

This would ensure that new users are only presented with modern, up-to-date tutorials, while also preserving older content in its historical context.

I agree that it would make sense to state something like “learn from users about how they recommend getting started” verses “this is the one, true, official way to use darktable”. Having a variety of perspectives would be helpful because one perspective may appeal to one group of new users and another to another group (e.g. if a new user is really into the teal/orange look and they see a set of tutorials from someone who also uses that style, it would be a natural fit)

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I like the idea of giving a stronger first impression for users of LR/Capture One. I would consider bolstering the homepage with some content, just to avoid page sprawl. I think a project that does this really well is Obsidian.

image
image1743×1508 277 KB

  • Highlights key features and why they’re special
  • Showcase beautiful screenshots of the app in use
  • Link out to more detailed resources
  • Appealing layout, typography, icon design and brand color unifies everything

Kinda rough, but an expanded homepage might look like so:

Home(2)
Home(2)1600×3861 2.93 MB

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I think the getting started page should be its own page, and we should forward to it after a user clicks a download button.

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I like the homepage mockup but I would advocate for putting the list of features (the “why”) before the large screenshot of the lighttable mode or maybe making the screenshot smaller so you don’t have to scroll as much to get to the list of features. I agree that Obsidian does this well.

I like @paperdigits idea of redirecting the download page to a list of Getting Started resources, but that page should also be prominently featured on the menu bar or elsewhere too in case you install darktable from your distro’s package manager or similar rather than downloading from the website

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Oh, good point. One thing I now wonder is: The photographs carry different licenses, which makes it difficult to use them together, e.g., in a lighttable screenshot. How would one approach this issue, to give attribution in a correct way, but not messing every screenshot with bazillions of author names.

I wonder if this can even be accomplished and would stay maintainable, e.g. having a separate page for the attributions and linking from every image, or if it would be better to request the cc0 license for further requests like this. This would not mean that no attribution would be given, but it would remove the pressure, and it would e.g. not be necessary to link to the attribution page from every screenshot 


What are your thoughts?

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I like the idea of getting cc0 license and maybe starting a repo of nice demo images. Then we just don’t have to worry about it. Not that I don’t want attribution, but we would have to mention everyone and it sounds like an administrative nightmare to me.

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Me too - sounds good. And if they’re primarily Raw+developed image pairs they can be used for tutorials and the like too?