6

After gathering your feedback and doing some research, I have spent some time working on the design for the site, and I am excited to share the result. Hope you like it, and I look forward to your feedback!

Spanish language site design

Based on some of the feedback and ideas shared by you all, I wanted the design to have an old-style feel to it while keeping it fun. The use of a serif typeface (Baskerville), together with the use of old handwritten texts from Spanish books in the background, help achieve this old-style feel. The artwork on the top right is a simple detail to add a bit of fun and more personality to the site, but also represent unique symbols of the Spanish language such as the ñ or exclamation marks (¡).

Color scheme

I decided to further follow feedback on colors and made a warm palette of reds and oranges. The color in the background is representative of the tones found in older pages of books.

Proposed color scheme for Spanish Language site design, incorporating 4 colors: #911F27 (vivid auburn or strong red), #630A10 (very dark red), #FCF0C8 (very soft/light yellow), and #FFFFFF (white).

Logo

The logo was kept simple with the use of an old-style typeface that dates back to around the 1750s.

Proposed logo, featuring the text "Spanish language" in the Baskerville typeface in very dark red text.

Favicon

Proposed favicon, featuring a white "ñ" inside a strong red/vivid auburn speech bubble.

Page Design

Proposed page design, showing the site's home page. The design appears as described in the "Spanish language site design" section above. The background of the page is in a very soft yellow, with faded images of old Spanish texts overlaid on it. In the top right, a larger copy of the site's favicon appears, with a smaller speech bubble to the left of it; that speech bubble is very dark red, and contains a white "ü" inside it. To the left of that is the text "¡hola!" in a golden color. Question titles and other links appear in vivid auburn/strong red text.

Proposed page design, showing the site's Questions page (/questions). The design is largely the same as the above, except this page includes excerpts of the questions.

We hope you enjoy this design, but if something doesn’t feel right, now is your chance to share your feedback. This window for feedback will be open for one week. We will then work to incorporate feedback as best as we can, finalize things on our end, and lastly, deliver the design to your site.

24
  • 1
    I like the design very much, congratulations! The Quixote references in the background look very cool, and also the typography and overall style is quite pleasant for the eyes. I don't understand both the ¡hola! and the ü on the top right corner. Also, the tags style could be softened a bit (now it looks like the standard format we already have). Thanks
    – fedorqui
    Commented Jun 2, 2022 at 7:12
  • 1
    Thanks, looks really good! Could you add a screenshot of how Meta is going to look like?
    – Glorfindel Mod
    Commented Jun 2, 2022 at 11:54
  • 1
    Thanks for the comments @fedorqui. The ü is a unique character to Spanish. Not as representative or as used as the ñ but thought it would be nice to add. The hola was really a way to incorporate the exclamation marks to not just have them by themselves.
    – J.S
    Commented Jun 2, 2022 at 14:26
  • 2
    @JoseSantiago mmm not really. See Ü in Wikipedia: Ü (lowercase ü), is a character that typically represents a close front rounded vowel [y]. It is classified as a separate letter in several big Latin alphabets (including Azerbaijani, Estonian, German, Hungarian and Turkish), but as the letter U with an umlaut/diaeresis in others such as Catalan, Galician, Occitan, Guarani and Spanish. Although not a part of their alphabet, it also appears in languages such as Finnish and Swedish when retained in foreign names and words such as München ("Munich"); ...
    – fedorqui
    Commented Jun 3, 2022 at 7:49
  • 1
    @fedorqui, you are correct. Me saying it is "unique" to Spanish was a mistake. A better word is representative. Thanks for the follow-up and research.
    – J.S
    Commented Jun 3, 2022 at 14:31
  • 2
    No problem :) it is great that you took the effort to think further and found a Spanish representative character. Not sure what to recommend here in the position of that ü, since I think there is no other symbol apart from the ñ. I do like having that ¡hola! as a way to represent the ¡, so maybe just removing the ü could work.
    – fedorqui
    Commented Jun 3, 2022 at 16:33
  • 1
    @fedorqui the thing on photography is separate. It's lower on the page. We can turn it on but it's not going to be part of the design process. But, also, y'all will need to have a plan for what you want to put in the image slot - designs are simple and static. What you're talking about would require us to develop a new feature
    – Catija
    Commented Jun 4, 2022 at 13:30
  • 1
    @JoseSantiago – I wanted the design to have an old-style feel – I'm sorry but I totally disagree. Spanish is a language not only rich in features, but also in constant and current evolution, spoken in thirty countries, twenty-one of them officially, and in unstoppable advance over others. Several questions on the site refer to new words used mainly in songs. In its last update of 2021, the Real Academia Española (RAE) incorporated 3,846 changes, including new words.
    – Danielillo
    Commented Jun 4, 2022 at 17:05
  • 3
    What about the badge icons?
    – wimi
    Commented Jun 4, 2022 at 21:03
  • 2
    @fedorqui it seems that English Language & Usage, English Language Learners and Japanese Language are the only language sites that got a design so far. This claim is based on going to All Sites and repeatedly Ctrl-F'ing the word "Language".
    – wimi
    Commented Jun 5, 2022 at 10:56
  • 3
    @danielillo, thanks for your feedback and facts. I did not mean to communicate Spanish is "old" but rather emphasize on its roots and history by this old-style approach. My approach to the design has a lot to do with the feedback given in the previous post: Custom Spanish Language design and logo - Information gathering
    – J.S
    Commented Jun 7, 2022 at 13:14
  • 1
    @wimi glad you like it!
    – J.S
    Commented Jun 7, 2022 at 13:17
  • 1
    @JoseSantiago I hadn't read the feed-back, in fact I didn't know there was a Spanish language Meta. But my opinion remains unchanged, choosing the past or the ancient as a representation of a language in constant evolution is something too immediate and without a solid foundation. On the contrary, I would choose freshness, the Latin color, for example, the flags of all the Spanish-speaking countries, none have static brown, on the contrary, blue-light blue predominates, white and in third place, bright blue and/or red.
    – Danielillo
    Commented Jun 7, 2022 at 13:30
  • 1
    There are much richer elements in symbology than the worn-out resource of the old. As for fonts, a large majority of Spanish, Mexican, Cuban, and South American painters usually incorporate text in their paintings. With a little research, something much more interesting than old-fashioned Baskerville surely comes.
    – Danielillo
    Commented Jun 7, 2022 at 13:31
  • 1
    Hey @Danielillo - I appreciate that you clearly have strong thoughts about this and it's too bad that you missed the first round of feedback that Jose linked to as this would have been really helpful to have heard about but - one of the main points of that first question is that, while we can make slight adjustments to the proposed design, going back and starting over isn't an option. Several of the other community members seem happy with this, with some small adjustments that are in scope, so that's the path we're going to take.
    – Catija
    Commented Jun 7, 2022 at 13:35

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
6
  • I would replace the ü with something more stereotypically Spanish like a ¿ (or some way to incorporate ¿...?) - to me ü is more representative of German.
  • The title font feels a little out of place to me, I'd pick something lighter weight e.g:

enter image description here

4

In response to the request to post comments as answers rather than add to the chain of comments I offer my thoughts.

I think it was always going to be hard to find a choice of colours which fitted here and the current choice looks good to me as does the overall design. My one beef is with the decision to choose a serif font for the words Spanish Language when the rest of the page, as far as my ageing eyes can see, has a sans-serif font. It is also a font with a high weight so, to me, sticks out like a sore thumb.

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .