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Design Brief
SpeakerInnen is an international bilingual social network for tech-y event organizers and female speakers.
Taglines we’re playing with include “Organizers, meet your speakers” and “spread the word”.
We believe that female speakers should be easier to find for tech-y event organizers.
We believe that event organizers should have the best speakers at their events, regardless of the speakers’ gender identification.
We believe in collaboration and not competition, so we encourage our speakers and event organizers to support each other and help speakers speak better.
We have two target markets: speakers and event organizers.
The speaker target market is primarily Ruby on Rails lady coders, since that’s the community we come from and the technology on which we are building the site. The RoR community has shown itself to be interested in bringing more women to tech, so their values align with ours.
That said, we don’t want to limit SpeakerInnen to only the RoR community, so nothing in the design should be exclusive to RoR—like the ruby gemstone, for example.
Once we build momentum within the RoR community, we would reach out to other groups so the target audience would expand over time.
Once we have 30-50 speakers on our site, we’ll be targeting tech-y event/conference organizers in tech-y industries, which means programming but also digital media, social media, user experience, and other digital / web awesomeness.
The website aims to get at least 30-50 speakers to sign up as speakers and to get event organizers to contact 3-5 speakers for their event.
Gallery of speakers Search function whose design explains how to use the search
Our audience will access the site with phones, tablets, laptops, so the design should be responsive.
We’re set on a clean design with a mostly white background and a bold use of at most two colors. Discuss (Sabrina & Maren): There needn't be a clean design. We like the idea with changing women pictures. But the functionals must be in the foreground.
We want a memorable visual identity but not one that distracts from our speakers.
The impression we want to give people is that we are fun, quirky, and useful.
We want to differentiate ourselves through design from our competitors/peers: http://www.digitalmediawomen.de/speakerinnen/ http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Geekspeakr (don’t think it’s still active but maybe interesting still to consider) https://www.socialtext.net/speakers/index.cgi
We like this font http://www.whatfontis.com/LOSTTYPE_Cubano-Regular.font because it’s bold, clean, fresh, strong, and as it is used on the Mobile Mobile site at http://www.mmconf.com/, it’s got a hand-printed look to it
One idea for making the site more fun and quirky is to have a hand-drawn mascot of sorts, like the pirate for http://arrrrcamp.be/ or the little foxes from Why: http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/
Our mascot ideas were a talking owl with speech bubbles (which we could later use for testimonials/endorsements), a microphone as the “I” in SpeakerInnen, and Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/dec/10/ada-lovelace-honoured-google-doodle We are open to other mascots ideas.
The other idea is to not have a mascot and have a design that draws attention to the speaker photos themselves. Some ideas we had for this were to frame each speaker photo in a circle of Hollywood-style bright lights, add a moustache to everyone’s photo, add a cartoon-ish superhero body under everyone’s photo, or have all the photos show up on one big overarching design theme like here: http://blog.railsberry.com/index.php/2013/04/16/8-speakers/ Again, we are open to other ideas to draw attention to the photos.
Discuss (Sabrina & Maren): It would be better not to focus too much on the pictures of the speakers but more on the topics they are experts in. So if we want to have a visual element we would prefer a mascot but this needn't be there right from the beginning.
http://www.railsberry.com/ because it’s hand-drawn, fun, and not boxy
http://www.applicake.com/team because the photos are animated and that draws attention to the faces themselves rather than a random theme
http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/faq/ because of the drawings on the different pages
http://www.mmconf.com/ because the design is memorable but not distracting from the content, the hand-made look that’s still professional, it’s quirky but not cute
Please no pink, no cupcakes, no hearts, no cocktails, no boxes, no lipstick
We would like to have 2-3 layout ideas for the homepage and 2-3 mascots/drawings for Monday.