Volo visual identity and website design

[zanona]

Why Volo

I have been using Volo for a few months, and it has been a great experience so far. I came from zero package management for my website assets, to having a centralised folder sharing the same library code to all the websites I have created (and suffering with versioning), then trying bower (struggling with cluttered project folders and a path soup of AMD modules), until I finally found Volo.

Volo today and its alternatives

Today, I think Volo is one of the most sensible solutions for website assets package management because it is basically invisible. I never enforces users to create configuration files other than package.json (which should be a standard, IMO) and it is even possible to define all the configuration under the file header, as comments.

Another huge benefit, is how Volo is much more than a simple package manager and also aims for task automation, being a considerable, lightweight, and yet, simple alternative to grunt or gulp.

In comparison to Bower (which is a trending topic nowadays), I believe Volo has so much more to offer, making developers lives much easier.

Gathering more users and contributors

All this great experience, led me to a point where I wanted to contribute with the project somehow and saw space for improvement under Volo's visual identity. I know that from a development point of view that doesn't help much, however, I think it is important to help Volo to become more popular, gathering more and more contributors and users with time, and one way of doing this, is to create a nice identity for the project

Currently, many well known open-source projects such as bower, grunt, gulp, Yeoman, etc, have their identities well defined, making it more appealing for new users to hop-in.

A great example can be seem on the newly re-designed npmjs.com page, showcasing a list of projects that run under NPM's technology. However, it is easy to see how important some project's logos are and can make a difference on the first impression and charisma it generates on users, specially new ones.

Concept

With that in mind, by quickly browsing websites such as bower.io, gruntjs.com, duojs.org, handlebarsjs.com, I can see that many have a great identity, however, some of the websites could be improved even more.

The name Volo in my opinion, is great, and as far as I understand, it would come from the italian term 'volare' meaning 'to fly', then 'volo', 'flight' which has a beautiful meaning and lots of ways to be interpreted and translated into the web development world. I usually portrait it as the image of an aviator in the sky or Icarus from greek mythology.

Source: dribbble.com

Plan of action

As a suggestion, I would recommend that the first action should be taken on creating a new visual identity for the project. Secondly, its website, following the same identity and principles, and lastly, discussing about new ways to present and format the content, where currently, most of it is sitting inside a Github Wiki repository.

• Volo logo and visual identity
• Volo website visual identity
• Volo website content structure

@jrburke and all contributors, please let me know your thoughts on it ;)
And thank you for making Volo, a possible choice for the web developers of today.

[jrburke]

I am very sorry for not getting to this, particularly after you put in some good work to it. For what it is worth, I like the wing/flight metaphor.

I have felt demotivated to work on volo due to the state of JS modules/package managers, wanted to do a bigger change for volo, but just have not been able to allocate time for it. That led into some gridlock for me on making decisions for it, like on this one. I did not want to impact others if I could not budget the time for it.

[zanona]

Don't worry James. It's completely understandable. I, however, have closed this since I have moved focus over another things at the moment and didn't want to lack in response if anyone provided feedback on this issue. So I believe we are in similar situation at the moment.

All the best