Improving how Dask looks on the web

@AdiReske

Hey all. I just wanted to provide an update on the progress made by the working group thinking about Dask's branding, websites, visual identity, etc. We will add more updates to this issue as things progress.

Coiled has provided some design resources for taking a high level look at Dask's websites, logos, colour schemes, etc. To make the best use of this resource @AdiReske, @jsignell, @mrocklin, @jrbourbeau and I have been meeting with Adi's team to talk about how we can improve things.

This effort started with a look at how Dask's various websites are performing in terms of getting the right information in front of folks. We have a bunch of different "foo.dask.org" Sphinx sites for the various subprojects under Dask. We also have a landing page at dask.org, a blog at blog.dask.org and the Dask dashboard. All of these web pages exist for different reason, are built in different ways and are often maintained by different folks. One big goal of the working group is to try and improve how Dask performs on search engines when folks are looking for ways to scale Pandas, NumPy and the PyData ecosystem. The way things are today aren't doing us many favours. We had an expert deliver some updates at the last Dask Community meeting which you can find summarised in these slides.

To improve this we are looking at building a new website for Dask which will hold non-documentation content as well as refreshing the documentation as a whole (#170).

The other task we've been working on is thinking about Dask's branding. This was started in #135 and #140 where we looked into things like colour schemes, diagrams, charts, etc.

The working group has rebooted those efforts as part of the holistic look at Dask's identity on the web and we are now exploring things like a logo refresh, colour pallettes, etc. Ideally we want to get to a point where the designers can give us enough structure that those of us (including me) who work on things like the Dask dashboard can apply colours and layouts that fit with the rest of Dask.

The first step on this activity has been to explore updating the Dask logo and I wanted to share some options that we are considering here. Ultimately the decision will be down to the working group but feedback is always welcome. These logos represent incremental change, evolutionary change and revolutionary change. You can read more about the thought process behind this here.

Once we've made some decisions here we will move on to addressing the goals of #135 where we can explore colours that we can use throughout Dask and iconography that members of the Dask community can use to build new diagrams that fit with our style.

@jacobtomlinson

Thanks for putting this up @jacobtomlinson, I'm adding here some extra options that were brought up in one of the meetings.

For the case of the Parallel logo, make it fit in a hexagon shape.
Other possible combinations

I really like the parallel computing logo. I have mixed feelings on the lowercase vs uppercase.

From the recording, there was some interesting conversation about upper vs lowercase. I have a preference for the upper case. Thoughts?

One of my biggest pet peeves is people that write dask in all caps, so my preference is for the lowercase (or title case like "Dask").

I share the pet peave about people upper-casing DASK in communication, however I think that we shouldn't use the logo in order to solve that problem. That feels like the tail wagging the dog a little. Aesthetically I like the upper-case. The letters fill out the space a bit better to my eye. That's totally subjective though.

The only reason why I mention this is that everytime I correct the spelling of Dask to someone, they mention that the logo is all uppercase and that's why they spell it that way. Seems like an easy thing to get right now if we're thinking of changing the logo.

I tend to agree with Jim that the logo being all caps leads people to think it's an acronym. This is definitely subjective, but I also think the lowercase feels more approachable and friendly.

I have been thinking about it and I really do like the simplified/single color wings. If it's not too much, I was wondering if we could see an all lower-case dask with the single color wings?

In my mind some of the good things about the wings are:

They don't look like any other logos
They work really well in single color on tshirts with dark or light backgrounds
The color goes well with a black "dask" word for cases where the style of the word is out of our control (I'm mostly thinking of github)
People already associate the logo with Dask. (I know this is kind of unfair to the other logos, but it is a real pro)

@jsignell

I agree it would be nice to see mockups of the other logos with the lowercase. I also wonder if we could have a titlecase mockup too, perhaps with the "as" in "Dask" stylized a little more.

I'm not a huge fan of the "evolution" logo, for me it is a close call between the "wings" and "parallel computing".

I agree with all of @jsignell's points about why the wings would be good to keep.

Things I like about the "parallel computing" one are:

It more symbolically represents what Dask does
It fits neatly into a hexagon, and hexagonal stickers on laptops are HUGE
It is fresh and represents a new chapter for Dask
It is more colourful

A couple of negatives might be:

It looks a little generic
It is visually similar to the AWS EC2 logo

As I say I'm very on the fence about which I like best.

I also think any of the options here are an improvement over what we have today. This is exciting!

@jsignell

Hi, Thank you for all the feedback. I've asked the designers to do another revision as per @jsignell . It feels like most people are happier with the lower case option and the rectangles icon. https://www.dropbox.com/sh/35iykmtyiz7qf1t/AACHr60Ssl2NwdCccGjD8FCYa?dl=0

I would also vote for keeping the sails/wings, sorry. I find the rectangles generic, especially in the coding world. I think having something does that not fit a typical hexagon is a good thing!

I love this one!!

@jacobtomlinson

I like both the evolution and parallel computing logos. I think that Dask could use a more modern image. I also want to give a +1 to this comment from @jacobtomlinson

It is fresh and represents a new chapter for Dask

I'd like for us to think about Dask as dynamic and changing, and not as static with past decisions. This applies to technology choices (I've been urging people to revisit old decisions/constraints) and I think that it should apply visually as well. We're all going to have a bias for the familiar. I think that we should prioritize not for existing users, but for future users who aren't yet bought in to the old design.

It feels like most people are happier with the lower case option and the rectangles icon

FWIW I'm seeing two in favor of lower case, two in favor of upper case, and one asking to see title case.

We're all going to have a bias for the familiar.

I'm not sure that's fair! Some might have a bias for "new" even when it's not warranted.

You're right, I shouldn't have said "all". But in general people have a strong bias for the familiar.

Changing logos has a long history of pretty much everyone not liking the change because it's familiar, and then once it happens people connect pretty strongly to the new logo.

So yeah, I didn't mean to say anything about folks here in particular, just about humans and this process in general.

@gjoseph92

@gjoseph92 the plan is to move from this issue to a mailing list where website-related things can be tracked. Previously everything was very developer-centric, part of the goal here is to become more inclusive towards non-developers. For example contributing blog posts is going to shift from needing to raise a PR to a Jekyll blog to needing to submit a Google Doc to a public mailing list.

We are definitely making trade-offs with this change. The main exchange here is increasing friction for a few (those of us who will have to maintain this new system) in order to reduce friction for many.

The goal is still to be as transparent as possible. Coordination will be done in public groups, and updating of the website and content will be managed by the web steering group, which effectively anyone can join in exchange for a long-term commitment to help manage it.

Question about the new dask-sphinx-theme. On https://ml.dask.org/ I get a double vertical scrollbar:

And I'm not sure if it's related, but the footer is cutoff halfway:

the plan is to move from this issue to a mailing list.

This seems a bit harder to manage to me, and easy for things to get lost. (See this thread, for reference.) What's wrong with an issue-only GitHub repo (just like dask/community)? Why create a new communication pattern here when the one we use everywhere else seems to work pretty well?

In the meantime, I'll keep adding to this thread, since that seems to be the approach for now:

Landing page

I land on the homepage and after reading every section, I still don't know what dask is. If I've never head of dask before, I'm aware that it claims to be able to "scale any Python code" and "deploy anywhere"... but what is it that I'm deploying? I would have expected a one-sentence explanation underneath "Scale the Python tools you love". Like "Dask is a flexible library for parallel computing in Python", as the sub-heading on the docs landing page explains.
What’s the motivation for the code samples being animated? They’re so fast, I can barely read them, and I know dask. If I wasn’t that familiar with it, they wouldn't be meaningful to me. Plus, they’re not copy-pasteable. A static code snippet seems much more useful to me, since you can read, understand, and copy it at your own pace.
Why are the installation instructions at the very bottom of the page, and not copy-pasteable, but animated?
"Scale PyData libraries" links only to "learn about DataFrames", but also mentions arrays and scikit-learn. We should arguably link to all three.
"Scale any Python code" links to Futures. I'd say Delayed is a better and more commonly-used and approachable interface for doing this.

Get started page

The copy

Dask is included by default in Anaconda. You can also install Dask with Pip, or you have several options for installing from source. You can also use Conda to update Dask or to do a minimal Dask install.

is somewhat awkward and verbose for explaining a very simple thing. Installing from source is not relevant to most people; the fact that you can "use conda to update dask" makes it sound like this is some special dask feature as opposed to just what any package manger does. Why not just "you can install dask with pip or conda"?
"Learn your way around" suggests links to tutorials and videos, but doesn't mention the docs.

Question about the new dask-sphinx-theme. On https://ml.dask.org/ I get a double vertical scrollbar

And I'm not sure if it's related, but the footer is cutoff halfway

I see the same issue on the dask-sql doc page as well:

@TomAugspurger

Thanks @TomAugspurger @ayushdg -- I opened a separate issue for the sphinx theme over in the dask/dask-sphinx-theme repo dask/dask-sphinx-theme#74

@jsignell

Amidst all of the micro-recommendations (thanks for the attention all!) I also wanted to take a moment and give a big shoutout to folks for getting this done. In particular I want to call out @jsignell @jacobtomlinson and @AdiReske for pushing this process through. The new style looks great, and I'm really impressed that we pulled everything off consistently and without hiccups.

Thank you everyone who contributed here!

@scharlottej13

Don't forget @scharlottej13! The new docs theme is so nice!

Hey all, I noticed the old logo is still used in several pages of https://tutorial.dask.org/, it doesn't look like there's a pattern to which pages still are using the old logo vs those using the new one, so it may be necessary to check one-by-one.

@pentschev

Thanks @pentschev -- just opened dask/dask-tutorial#239

Have we shared the new logo with NumFOCUS? Looks like they are still using the old one

Also may want to sync with them about stickers (so they are using the new logo as well)

@jakirkham

we did https://numfocus.myspreadshop.com/all but good call! i'll ask them to update this page as well @jakirkham

@AdiReske

Thanks @AdiReske! 🙏

May also be worth mentioning using this on stickers or other swag. SciPy 2022 is coming up soon and the NumFOCUS Summit in September. So it would be good to make sure anything they have there is using the new logo. Sounds like you are already engaged with NumFOCUS, but happy to help connect you if that would help 🙂

yes! here is he sticker and I'll ask Jim to bring it with them https://numfocus.myspreadshop.com/dask+logo+sticker?idea=629e25e254e3e23bfd511fea we also have https://www.pythonatscale.com/ in October with Numfocus

@jakirkham

Thanks @jakirkham and @AdiReske. At PyData London last weekend Numfocus still had the old logo up. I pointed this out to Jim and he assured me the new logo would be used going forward.

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Improving how Dask looks on the web #220

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Improving how Dask looks on the web #220

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ncclementi commented on Feb 15, 2022

hayesgb commented on Feb 16, 2022

jcrist commented on Feb 16, 2022

mrocklin commented on Feb 17, 2022

jcrist commented on Feb 17, 2022

jsignell commented on Feb 17, 2022

jacobtomlinson commented on Feb 17, 2022

jacobtomlinson commented on Feb 17, 2022

AdiReske commented on Feb 17, 2022

martindurant commented on Feb 17, 2022

jsignell commented on Feb 17, 2022

mrocklin commented on Feb 17, 2022

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jacobtomlinson commented on Jun 6, 2022

TomAugspurger commented on Jun 6, 2022

gjoseph92 commented on Jun 6, 2022

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ayushdg commented on Jun 6, 2022

jrbourbeau commented on Jun 6, 2022

mrocklin commented on Jun 7, 2022

jsignell commented on Jun 7, 2022

pentschev commented on Jun 7, 2022

jrbourbeau commented on Jun 7, 2022

jakirkham commented on Jun 22, 2022

AdiReske commented on Jun 22, 2022

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