I’ll have specific changes to share in my next update, but to kick us off, I wanted to share my thoughts about how I imagine things coming together:
Eliminating redundancy
There are four pages that talk about Resonate’s model & values—/
, /about
, /coop
, /manifesto
, and /pricing
—and many of the notes I’m responding to are about content being too dense and long. Much of that comes from rephrasing the same concepts across multiple pages; e.g., manifesto blurbs in /about
, blocks from /coop
directly copied over to /
, etc., so the biggest thing I’ll be doing is bringing these pages back to their roots.
I understand why the redundancy is useful—giving people context without sending them down all sorts of rabbit holes—but I believe a combination of condensing the copy and adding links can be done well to mitigate that concern. Plus: clean, tight pages will make exploration more fun & informative.
Visualizations
On the fun & informative note, there are a few places where I’ll be doing graphics to replace or augment copy:
For /pricing
, I’d like to redo the stream2own graphic into something that communicates the progression more literally. Think stair steps, or a high striker.
For /coop
, a major note is that we need to introduce folks to what a co-op is. @Z in his notes shared a graphic showing how the hierarchy flipped, and there are plenty of other examples out there to visualize a democratic organizational model. “One-member, one-share, one-vote” and liquid democracy are other concepts worth visualizing.
For /
, I’d like to find something playful to do with the hero—which might just mean putting copy in an interesting container, but could mean something more—and I really want to kill the “Play fair” text and just make the groovy “Play fair” record glyph huge instead (that whole section is getting refactored, anyway)
I am not an illustrator so these will be outliney, but maybe y’all can convince @Bridget to breathe some life into them after I’m done.
Proportions and divisions
The current layout has the sizes and shapes of things changing a lot, seemingly out of an interest in adhering rigorously to the masonry grid style (which to be fair is the site’s fundamental layout element). The effect though, is to make the pages feel disjointed. On a page like /coop
, each block looks like its own section, and my eyes don’t know where to go. Some of the more important headlines are given a bigger size, but there are too many other sizes of text to make these really stand out. Compounding this is that some grid alignments make blocks appear as more closely related to one another than they really are, which overpowers the natural reading flow.
/
is a good start at using the grid without explicit blocks (i.e. no borders, more negative space). I’m gonna lean into that. I’m also going to do less multicolumn—it works in a few places, but it creates problems more often than not. Linear reading flows will help y’all write copy that flows better, because you only have to consider that one path for moving from section to section.