Splash screen

The splash screen contest has come and gone. Some (like me) like the splash, and others don’t. I agree with Nat’s comments about the splash being uninteresting to users, but I still like it. Perhaps a list of finalists with a short frame of time to express opinions about the chosen splashes would have been better (suggested by Andrew Johnson today), but we can learn from this and maybe we can do that next time.

I’d like to point out one entry that Jakub liked that I don’t think met the criteria. This entry doesn’t conform to the “No English text” rule. I know, it’s sign language; but the sign language used is American Sign Language. This is a specific language to the American deaf community and is NOT universal. There are many different sign languages around the world with their own alphabet. Some, like British Sign Language are very different from American Sign Language’s alphabet. I know it’s a nitpick, but if we’re going to say that the splash can’t have English text because we don’t want to translate the splash for users that speak another language, then we can’t have a language other than English (ASL) on our splash because we’d have to translate that as well.