EDIT - 5 Jun 2015:
Thank you very much for an outstanding redesign. I un-downvoted, and like the following:
- The router hockey-puck is a home run; great re-use of the puck as the letter "O". Simple. Jammin. Bravo.
- Incorporating a network diagram into the background is a nice touch; although it's practically invisible in my mobile browser. I'm including a clickable image below for a better look...
I have a few small quibbles:
- Maybe these are just mock ups, but in case they are not: your coffee cup, t-shirt, and other swag are missing Stack Exchange branding / url. Please pump the site.
- Could you give us a comparison of what the diagram in the banner looks like if you made the banner background lighter like the one on Graphic Design?
- I have to say that I'm still a little underwhelmed with the mustard-green color. I get an icky feeling (for lack of a more appropriate adjective) when I look at the mustard-green logo. I happen to be typing on my Debian laptop, and I use an xterm with 256 colors. Are you open to using the xterm-256 colors instead? This also would be a win because many network engineers love linux / OSX on our laptops. Maybe you could color "questions", "tags", "users", etc... in the same xterm colors (see below).
My xterm-256 window:
Thanks again!
*Original Post*:
- The circuitboard-inspired font and background with dots joining lines has nothing to do with real network diagrams.
- If you had not told us that the colors were pulled from cable colors, I would have never known. It's really too much; I especially dislike the color combination of the orange vote box and green accept.
If you want inspiration, take pictures of a 66-block, SC-fiber end, the page header from RFC 2328, a typical network diagram, people gathered around a white board, or maybe some Cisco / Juniper hockey-pucks. Another possibility, grab a photo of an old Cisco AGS+ (you know, the router that was Cisco's first "big iron").
This site is under constant pressure from people who are clueless about networks and many times need to ask on Super User. The existing design proposal does nothing to give them a hint that they are asking in the wrong place; worse still, the design does nothing to attract the real professionals we want to attract. Please give us something that harkens back to our professional network engineering experience.
End note: in the examples above, I intentionally went with "classic technology" so there would be less worry about the timelessness of the design. I'm trying to draw from the images that launched network engineering as a profession in the 1980s and 1990s.