Beta testers - We're excited to give you a heads up on some upcoming features. One of them will feature a new header and navigation design and this journal explains the rational behind it. If you’ve been following our timeline you might have seen a familiar thread in some of our journals. We've discussed new ideas about the organization and navigation design of the site. For reference: Beginnings of Site Simplification, Cleaning-up Site Naming, Profiles Discussion, Support the Community, New Watch Discussion, and Notifications Discussion.
Your feedback in these journals has been very helpful (thank you). We've learned a lot: For example: Having a notification dropdown menu is useful but you still want easy access directly to those those sections. Another example is to make important sections like Daily Deviations easier to find.
Whether you’ve realized it or not, your comments and feedback has helped us understand how you would like to navigate the site, and this journal presents some of our final ideas for the global navigation of the site.
THE BIG PICTURE
WATCH & EXPLORE
One of our primary goals for the new organization is to make it easier to understand how DeviantArt works. We know that for some new deviants, it's not always easy to know how the site and community work. So we asked ourselves a simple question:
Q: How does DeviantArt work?
A: Explore and contribute to the world's largest art community and discover a broad range of art and artists. Watch the artists you'd like to stay up-to-date with. Receive updates and opportunities to support their work. As an artist, you can submit and create a gallery of your art, and build an audience of fans and supporters.
Watch and Explore are the primary activities on DeviantArt.
WATCH
You might have seen our recent journal about our new Watch ideas? We discussed new navigation ideas to manage the updates from the people you watch: Deviations (Their art and Literature), Posts (Their Journals, Status updates and Polls), Community (How you can support them) and Shop (Commerce opportunities).
EXPLORE
Explore contains many of the content sections currently in browse. We plan on adding a few new ones over the coming months: Contests Making it easier to participate in a contest), Trending Tags (Capturing global day-to-day activity), and Categories (Making it easier to find the specific category of art you like).
NAV BAR DESIGN
COLOR
We're using a dark header with this new design. It will appear on every page of the site and needs to be consistent with how it works and looks. It will sit on top (literally) of many different styles of page across the site, and there are many different kinds of pages: For example: Our profile journal presented the addition of a canvas art header, and the possible option of selecting a unique color for the page background. If we move ahead with those ideas we want to make sure that when someone visits your profile they still know how to navigate DeviantArt.
ICONS
Below is the submit menu and you'll notice the icons. Since the launch of our new brand we've started to look at the role of icons in our designs. If you use our apps you'll see icons for the navigation menu and that's given us a few new ideas for the site. Some are more playfull than others, the intent is to give each section a distinctive identity.
