I'd like to add some constructive criticism and maybe some assistance in the right direction. I think Darkcoin could use a new site, a new wallet splash page, and some additional marketing material but before everyone goes off doing their own thing in order to claim bounties I think the Darkcoin brand needs to be setup. Darkcoin needs an official logo. Along with this a branding guide. Color schemes need to be set in stone. An official font needs to be chosen, a font size, font weight, etc. There needs to be a model from which all additional marketing materials are created from. Without this in place you do not have a brand. The coin will be stuck in the same place it's in right now as far as marketing goes.
By no means am I trying to say that any work done so far is not quality work. I'm only suggesting that brand guidelines be set so that everyone's work focuses on advancing the Darkcoin name.
Think about Coca-Cola, Dr. Pepper, Pizza Hut, the Bitcoin 'B' icon, etc... Every recognizable company has a set branding guideline.
http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/brand_guidelines_tpa_nov_2008.pdfI couldn't agree with you more. In an ideal world I'd just hire a marketing group to handle that for us, however we don't have the budget for that. So we're sourcing all of this work from the community, with incentives via bounties. If someone with branding experience steps up to coordinate the effort, that would be fantastic and I'd say yes in a heartbeat. In the meantime, we're taking the approach of throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. Or at least, that's what we're doing with the logo. We've had a lot of user-submitted logos generated, and I'm thinking about redirecting the existing logo bounty towards paying for a set of crowdsourced logo designs, which the community can then all vote on. Personally I'm of the view that logo should drive the rest of the design & colour scheme. We're not exactly following that methodology right now because of time & resource constraints, but I'm trying to move us in that direction.
Roughly this is how I see Darkcoin's brand progressing:
Crowdsourced logos (e.g. from designcrowd.com) --> Community votes on logo --> Generate branding guide --> Generate additional graphics --> Customise WP template for site
LimLims I know you're coordinating this on a volunteer basis, and I thank you for your hard work, but if you're "of the view that logo should drive the rest of the design & colour scheme" and see the website template as something that would only get changed down the track, you probably shouldn't give the impression that it could happen now. I wrote with a suggestion to find a better template for the website and you wrote back to me...
There is a bounty out for that. If you put together a customised WP template and the community likes it, you'd have a claim to 272 DRK.
I did, not because I want the bounty, but because I think it would be great to have a better looking website asap with more explanation about why darkcoin is something to get excited about. But now I see from your process above it was probably a waste of time.
Sorry to rant, and I don't mean any disrespect, but it would probably be good to have tasks stepped out by priority so that people aren't doing unnecessary work.
