[Bf-docboard] Blender 2.40 QuickStart Guide (FINAL)

[Ewout Fernhout]

Hello Frédéric,
First of all I want to start by saying you did a great job at making
this quickstart chart. It's nice for people to have on their desks
when they just downloaded blender and don't know where to start. It's
a very good reference for those difficult first days :o)

Now I think there's a few things we want to accomplish with this
chart. The most important and also the most obvious thing is that we
want to show the user how blender works. However, that's not the only
thing in my opinion. It needs to shine a bit aswell, after all this
will be used by artists, not technicians! I totally understand your
comments about being distracted, but only partly agree in this case.
Especially since you do not seem to be working by this principle
yourself. I found it very strange that you tried to make the icons
something they are not. Why do you make 'fancy' vector icons that are
based on the icons in the GUI, instead of actually using those? After
all, that's what the user sees! It looks like you tried to make the
document "shining" (as you call it) there aswell...
Also, you say that the user knows it's Blender, but that doesn't mean
it doesn't need the Blender stilo (and logo for that matter).
I actually think that the chart is something between a marketing
brochure and an educative document, since the user needs to be
'persuaded' to use blender. Look at it this way: if the user got a dry
list of shortkeys and icons without any stiling, he/she would probably
not be encouraged to read it.

I find the ink problem a non-argument. That's for poor people, they
should probably not print at all. If it was a whole book(let) I would
agree, but this is just a sheet of paper, where a couple of more
inkspots don't matter that much. Again, it's not a russian technical
document (nofi). I do agree on the saturation, but it's hard balancing
between boring and attractive.

That said, I think we can draw some conclusions about how the document
should look (these are all my opinion and I invite everyone to discuss
this).

* The document should be clearly structured, so the user can easily find things.
* Attention should be drawn to the important things.
* The icons should be the actual icons used, not some fancy loose interpretation
* It's Blender, don't make it look like a generic document. Style
consistency comforts the user/reader. What does a Blender logo
hurt/break?

Now about the colors. I think that, if I had to choose between your
greyish blue or blender blue, I would opt for the last for consistency
and because the greyish blue you used lacks definition in this
context. However, that particular blue is pretty dark, so maybe blue
is not a good choice after all. Blender.org also makes use of a lot of
light-grey tints, perhaps use that if you want to save on ink?

I would still opt for the orange. Why? Because it looks nice. I know
it's saturated, but it's just one page. It's not like people will have
to concentrate a lot on the page for long periods of time. I actually
printed the last version by Pierre-Luc Auclair, and it's easy to read!
The first comment I would (rather) give is that the font is probably
too small. I know you're aiming for a one page document, but if you're
talking about readability, I think that issue is far more important
than the orange bars.

About the document size: that's probably caused by the soft drop
shadows. Your solution (which is what exactly what I proposed earlier
and nicely done!) is better I think. The header images are just taking
10kb extra, which is not a big case IMO. Even the size it is now,
200kb, what's that anyway?

Ewout