Promoting D projects (or internet marketing 101)

[Bill Baxter]

Oskar Linde wrote:
> Walter Bright wrote:
> 
>> Bill Baxter wrote:
>>
>>> Here's a slightly touched up version of the happy D guy on 
>>> overview.html.  Just a little bit-o-gradient to replace the 100% 
>>> saturated red color.  I tried fixing the lack of antialiasing in the 
>>> outline but couldn't find any combo of photoshop filters that 
>>> actually made an improvement.
>>
>>
>> It does look a bit better, but it's 3x larger than the .gif file. I 
>> suppose there's no hope for that, though. The only way to fix the 
>> antialiasing problem is just to redraw it by tracing it.
> 
> 
> I just processed it though the Inkscape[1] auto tracer and did some 
> manual cleanups. Some details were lost, but I didn't have time to spend 
> more than 10 minutes on this. zlib-compressed the svg turned out to be 
> less than 6 kb which is approximately 2x the original in size.
> 
> The png should be unnecessary as everyone nowadays has svg support in 
> their web browsers, right? ;)
> 
> [1] http://www.inkscape.org
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------


Great.  Definitely an improvement.

Now let's have the discussion we should have been having :-) -- why is 
there a poorly drawn cartoon 'D' apparently cheering for himself on the 
overview page?  It makes no sense.  At best it looks like he's trying to 
say "I'm D and I think I'm awesome" like some hot shot 4 year old on a 
playground full of 3 year olds.

It's cute, but it would make much more sense on the "How To Promote D" 
page or a "D Success Stories" page than on the public introduction, 
which will be read by a bunch of people who are probably skeptical about 
D to begin with.

--bb