The old site said to me "Here's a programming language made by programmers for programmers.".
The new site says to me "Here's a programming language which has a marketing team.".
The "Featuring" bullet list was an excellent way of calling out what makes Rust distinctive, and I felt I could trust what it said to be basically true.
But claims like "empowers everyone to become a systems programmer" or "Rust has great documentation", coming from the language's own designers, convey little information: they might be an over-optimistic view.
(Or, in the language of the blog post: I trust them to tell me what a fireflower is. I'd rather judge for myself whether I believe that it will turn me into Fire Mario.)
I strongly agree. The list of features on the old list is very meaningful to a C programmer who will recognize all of those things as things would love to use every day. Its underlying message is "we're technical nerds and we made a thing that you'll like".
The new version is corporate-speak that won't appeal to.. anyone? Its underlying message is "we're trying to get you to like us and we studied how to do this".
But, like, what's the point of a programming language's website anyway? Most people who visit the site will probably be at least vaguely aware of it. You use it if recommendations online, code samples, etc are compelling, and if the early adoption story (examples and motivations) are compelling. All I ever want is a list of examples up front and center. The more words I have to get through that aren't literal actual examples that show both what the language looks like and what differentiates it... the more exhausting the whole experience.
I totally agree. As a coder, whenever I visit a website of a project I'm interested in, I'm looking for key technical features to convince me it's the right tool for the job, or that it offers an unique property tht I never even thought about. That's usually conveyed in a list of bullet points, and a couple of examples.
I can rarely find it though. I wasn't quite able to grasp why, and I kind of accepted this as how it is. But after seeing the two revisions side by side, I finally get it! The important, unique information found in the old version. The majority of project web sites are closer to the new version, which hides the complexity behind colorful "screens" and headlines which are short, friendly, distracting, and very, very bland, delivering the same "simplicity, performance, productivity" message regardless of the project. Can you guess what Docker does (or does especially well) just based on the website? [0]
I've learned to cut the crap and go straight to the "about" page to understand the distinct advantages in a more condensed form, but that seems to be missing from the redesign.
Obviously the website is no longer targeted at coders: the Rust Team seems to target managers to push adoption. To me, it looks like a corporation that has to report user growth every quarter, so they start employing harmful UX to desperately try to push the numbers up.
The point of the old website was convincing developers to use Rust. It seems the point of the new one is convincing the higher ups to let their developers use Rust.
I have been using Google Cloud for many years now. I used it because I thought it was technically superior than AWS and several others. However, for years, many mocked it as a second-tier cloud provider that wasn't "serious". Then Google brought on Diane Green. As a technical nerd, I wasn't too pleased. Their nerdy How-To articles morphed into Enterprise Success Stories. It was irritating, but it also raised Google-Cloud to a "serious" cloud provider.
Even though Rust's marketing pivot will likely irritate many, it's likely better for it long term.
Agreed. As much as I liked the old site I think the rust team made the right call on this one.
Perhaps the old page could be moved somewhere close to the language docs instead of being removed, but I'm confident whoever is in charge has given this much more thought than I could ever give (as well as most of the commenters here).
Interestingly, Diane Green just left Google Cloud, under somewhat unclear circumstances. It's possible that she did her job, "mission accomplished", it's possible that she did not do it well enough to attract big enterprise clients, but the most satisfying reason (albeit least likely), is that the Google decided to focus back on the technology and less on enticing Enterprise clients with laminated corporate-speak marketing.
So even though this is probably the right move for Rust, it would behoove them to keep a section of their site/blog/newslettter/slack channel/etc for the nerds to get together working on what they love.
If it empowered everyone, it would be available on other OSes than Linux, Windows, and macos (ok, it is available on Android and iOS apparently and some *BSD variants too).
I'd love to use Rust - but my business requires support for, (in addition to Linux and Windows), Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, and OS400 for me to serve my customer base.
Rust can't empower me there, it simply isn't available.
There are people working on it! Debian is now shipping 14 architectures. The big show-stopper is if LLVM has support for a particular bit of hardware. OSes are easier. We need people who know these systems to help out. It's not easy, but we'll get there.
The old site was pleasantly minimal, easy to find the important things at a glance, and fit everything into a single screen.
The new one overloads you with bright, ever changing colors and useless marketing, while hiding important stuff like language documentation into a tiny link at the very bottom, next to the site terms and conditions.
The existing site's "rust by example" is extremely valuable. It's up front and centre. In the new site it's very buried, which is a shame. Much easier to get started, perhaps, but much less easy to see whether I'd want to in the first place.
In my (useless) opinion, the old website looks more modern and approachable. I can see immediately what are the benefits of Rust, as well as a code sample. The new site only offers a vague tagline ("The programming language that empowers everyone to become a systems programmer."), which doesn't explain much.
In my (useful(?)) opinion, the code sample didn't really illustrate the nice things about rust. I do like the bulleted list from the old website, but I find the new website more modern and approachable (especially with all the big headings and smaller text that drills down into the details). Maybe they wanted to give users a more focused view on the biggest selling points, rather than show some generic-looking code and several bullet points that noobs might not understand?
But, in my (useless) opinion, the green is... "bold", and that part isn't very modern or approachable
I don't hate it, but I do miss the similarity the old site had to the rest of the ecosystems documentation. I'm glad to see more information added though.
I'm not a huge fan, but it's not bad. Some Rust sponsors have their big logos on there, and the Rust Book (the real documentation) is at the very bottom of the page.
This website seems like they are targeting CEO and CTO's. The website looks very much like a business website trying to get corporations to sign up. The old website felt it was targeting programmers with it's code sample that you could modify and run directly on the web page.
Yes exactly! The content targetting "system programmers" is odd as Rust is great for so much more like the examples towards the bottom about webassembly and such.
Additionally the website seems to take longer to load.
The colors, the fonts and the thick bars behind the headlines are really distracting and most important: example code on the front is missing as well as the clearly stated list of features ("zero-cost abstractions, move semantics, guaranteed memory safety [...]").
The buttons in the "get involved" section should better be labeled "read the book", "watch videos" and "read contribution guide".
The z-index of the "Click here to try out the new beta site!" banner on rust-lang.org is wrong when scrolling down.
Doesn't the "small Rust application" at the bottom of the page lack an "extern crate ferris_says;"? I know very little about Rust, but I cannot get the example to work without that...
Rust 2018 does not require extern crate anymore (except in certain very limited circumstances); when this page goes live, that will work. Or you can try it out on beta.
I liked the old site better. It looked like a site about Rust programming language. It had the benefits of the language on it, this new site doesn't look like a site for programmers at all.
It now just looks like every other generic looking product page out there.
I think if I had come to this new site, and not the old site, I might not have bothered to even try Rust out. The new look is just so 'meh'.
Warning; I'm going to have a brutally honest opinion here.
It's better to start over. With a proper UX design, a proper visual design and a good quality frontend developer. Or at least, as close as you can get.
My first few thoughts on the design:
The design language doesn't seem to convey anything. Whoever chose that color palette? What are the core principles it's supposed to show you?
Elements are severely misaligned all over the place. There is no coherency, composition or vertical rhythm to be found. It has a hodgepodge of font sizes and weights without clear typographic hierarchy.
Links are actually missing a hover state. Buttons have a hover state, just don't expect it to be noticeable. Just like the font size on the buttons - those are 12px. We don't have 1280x1024 screens, unless I've somehow traveled back in time to 1999. 16px minimum, please.
There is too little breathing room on mobile. It's not actually responsive, it just collapses on a single breakpoint. That breakpoint is also in the wrong place (960px), making it too big on tablet portrait (750px buttons, really?) and too small on desktop (960px max on HD+ screens, even 2.5K screens - really?).
It looks like it's made with an off the shelf layout framework without any sort of customization. There's a horrible google calendar embed - why not a simple, integrated solution? There are upscaled(!) PNG logos on there (Chucklefish, Yelp) - why not use a vector file, like decent folk?
Those design patterns are barebones, but work reasonable well on the homepage. However, the moment you click through they seem to be (ab)used for anything and everything. Where are the other, less generalized patterns? And why are the patterns not actually designed for mobile as well? Just dumping all the buttons below each other and making them 100% wide does not make for a good user experience. For that matter, why are there not more effective patterns used? Code example could really use an, oh I don't know, inline code example perhaps? Fortunately, almost all links go to external (sub)sites -without warning- so you won't have to look at this for too long. Just a shame everything looks different from each other, even subsites.
Where are the loving touches? It doesn't have to be a christmas tree, but a little transitions and effects go a long way.
As for the code:
A display font is fine, but preloading six (6!) font weights of the body font, just on the homepage? And not even .woff2 or .woff, but huge .ttf files at that! That's about 3MB of fonts. Nice when you're on 3G; you can see the webpage building up.
It seems to use utility classes. The responsibility for style composition should be in your stylesheets, never in the HTML. The classes look like some clever backend developer cooked them up: "v-top pl4 pl0-l pt0 pt3-l measure-wide-l mw4 mw5-ns w-100 mw-none ph3 mw8-m mw9-l center f3". There, everybody intelligent will immediately know what it does! If you rely on good will for maintenance, this will limit the amount of developers willing to dig in.
Also, there are 4 different CSS files, separated for no apparent reason. Three of which aren't even minified.
SVG illustrations should be placed inline.
As someone with an enmity for big javascript libraries used in the wrong places, the fact that there's no JS should be wonderful. Except that I'm guessing that's part of the reason those design patterns are so barebones.
There's lots more, but let's pick the low hanging fruits first.
PS: I prefer this version: https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/ ;-)
It might be stamp-sized visually, but it does some things much better.
Some of this is stuff we know, and are tweaking. As the blog post about this says, this is a beta, and we have a lot more work to do. For example, the calendar thing: it's temporary. It's not trivial to style. There's been zero optimization work, which is a lot of what your comment is about. We didn't want to invest in that until we got the big picture stuff down.
I actually like the new website. I think the primary barrier to Rust adoption now is something along the lines of "my organization doesn't use it"—this website is clearly geared toward persuading CTOs or administrators.
It's a sign of the strength of the Rust community that they feel they no longer need to persuade developers. It implies that many developers have already heard about and are interested in Rust, but need higher-ups to approve using it.
Well said. As a programmer I prefer the old site, however you bring up a good point. The new site is a lot better for people in management to see that Rust is used by other large companies and to not immediately discredit it.
The new subtitle "The programming language that empowers everyone to become a systems programmer" is a perfect example of that.
Any C programmer can see it's factually false, but it could definitely suggest to a C-level exec that they'll have an easier time hiring in the future if they use this language.
The colors are great, really comfortable contrast level, and the typeface is easy to read. Fairly tight information density, but low-density layouts are a common complaint with the target audience so I think it strikes a good balance. My compliments to the designer.
In general I like the approach of the beta website, though I prefer the very simple visual style of the current one.
The one main objection is the new slogan.
> Rust: The programming language that empowers everyone to become a systems programmer.
They claim it better conveys "what you can do with Rust", but in my opinion being a systems programmer is not more descriptive than the previous statement and it can be read as Rust not being a good choice for anything else than traditional systems programming, which is obviously not true.
Additionally, and this is subjective, I perceive an elitist tone, as in somehow all other programmers should aim to become system programmers, a more elevated type of programmer. I get this is not the intention and I repeat it's subjective, but still.
Also, systems programming is about so much more than being good a programming in a particular language. Programming in rust doesn't make you understand memory barriers.
I guess it depends on what you mean by systems programming. You absolutely need to understand memory barriers if you are doing operating systems work; no language can spare you from that.
Fear of empty space is showing a lot on new website. Also poor contrast, poor font size, poor vertical spacing, buttons as links - all make things very difficult to even just read. Meanings of links and labels are confusing too.
Don't make it so hard for people to find the compiler and documentation. You are not going to attract users this way.
Feature request: A documentation search bar right at the top on the homepage. As an existing user, that's usually the first thing I want to see. After that, a link to browse the documentation. Then a link to install it.
When looking at the home page, I don't know what "Get started" is going to take me to, but experience with other sites has given me a bad taste with "Get started" buttons. (The content it leads to here is good, though much of it would have been better put on the front page.)
Personally, I think trying to sell the language on the homepage is the wrong goal. I like language examples on the homepage to make a snap judgement about a language. If I can't see an example, I'm going to assume that there is a reason you don't want me to see it.
If I'm unfamiliar with the language, the things I want are:
* A code example
* A listing of properties of the language (e.g. statically typed, compiled, no gc, memory managed at compile time, etc)
* A command to install it
* A link to a tutorial where I can quickly try out the basics
* A link to the documentation so I can get a sense of its quality
115 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 172 ms ] threadThe old site said to me "Here's a programming language made by programmers for programmers.".
The new site says to me "Here's a programming language which has a marketing team.".
The "Featuring" bullet list was an excellent way of calling out what makes Rust distinctive, and I felt I could trust what it said to be basically true.
But claims like "empowers everyone to become a systems programmer" or "Rust has great documentation", coming from the language's own designers, convey little information: they might be an over-optimistic view.
(Or, in the language of the blog post: I trust them to tell me what a fireflower is. I'd rather judge for myself whether I believe that it will turn me into Fire Mario.)
The new version is corporate-speak that won't appeal to.. anyone? Its underlying message is "we're trying to get you to like us and we studied how to do this".
But, like, what's the point of a programming language's website anyway? Most people who visit the site will probably be at least vaguely aware of it. You use it if recommendations online, code samples, etc are compelling, and if the early adoption story (examples and motivations) are compelling. All I ever want is a list of examples up front and center. The more words I have to get through that aren't literal actual examples that show both what the language looks like and what differentiates it... the more exhausting the whole experience.
I can rarely find it though. I wasn't quite able to grasp why, and I kind of accepted this as how it is. But after seeing the two revisions side by side, I finally get it! The important, unique information found in the old version. The majority of project web sites are closer to the new version, which hides the complexity behind colorful "screens" and headlines which are short, friendly, distracting, and very, very bland, delivering the same "simplicity, performance, productivity" message regardless of the project. Can you guess what Docker does (or does especially well) just based on the website? [0]
I've learned to cut the crap and go straight to the "about" page to understand the distinct advantages in a more condensed form, but that seems to be missing from the redesign.
[0] https://www.docker.com/
Obviously the website is no longer targeted at coders: the Rust Team seems to target managers to push adoption. To me, it looks like a corporation that has to report user growth every quarter, so they start employing harmful UX to desperately try to push the numbers up.
Even though Rust's marketing pivot will likely irritate many, it's likely better for it long term.
Perhaps the old page could be moved somewhere close to the language docs instead of being removed, but I'm confident whoever is in charge has given this much more thought than I could ever give (as well as most of the commenters here).
So even though this is probably the right move for Rust, it would behoove them to keep a section of their site/blog/newslettter/slack channel/etc for the nerds to get together working on what they love.
I'd love to use Rust - but my business requires support for, (in addition to Linux and Windows), Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, and OS400 for me to serve my customer base.
Rust can't empower me there, it simply isn't available.
The new one overloads you with bright, ever changing colors and useless marketing, while hiding important stuff like language documentation into a tiny link at the very bottom, next to the site terms and conditions.
It is dazzle camouflage [0] for information.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage
The getting started stuff is good, though.
But, in my (useless) opinion, the green is... "bold", and that part isn't very modern or approachable
Is there a way to have good keyboard support & have it look good?
Additionally the website seems to take longer to load.
I loved the playground editor embedded in the old front page. Any chance it can be added to this one as well?
The buttons in the "get involved" section should better be labeled "read the book", "watch videos" and "read contribution guide".
The z-index of the "Click here to try out the new beta site!" banner on rust-lang.org is wrong when scrolling down.
I don't think those new playful colors will fit the whole ecosystem.
In particular, the "fuschia" background color makes for poor readability (at least for me).
It now just looks like every other generic looking product page out there.
I think if I had come to this new site, and not the old site, I might not have bothered to even try Rust out. The new look is just so 'meh'.
It's better to start over. With a proper UX design, a proper visual design and a good quality frontend developer. Or at least, as close as you can get.
My first few thoughts on the design:
The design language doesn't seem to convey anything. Whoever chose that color palette? What are the core principles it's supposed to show you?
Elements are severely misaligned all over the place. There is no coherency, composition or vertical rhythm to be found. It has a hodgepodge of font sizes and weights without clear typographic hierarchy.
Links are actually missing a hover state. Buttons have a hover state, just don't expect it to be noticeable. Just like the font size on the buttons - those are 12px. We don't have 1280x1024 screens, unless I've somehow traveled back in time to 1999. 16px minimum, please.
There is too little breathing room on mobile. It's not actually responsive, it just collapses on a single breakpoint. That breakpoint is also in the wrong place (960px), making it too big on tablet portrait (750px buttons, really?) and too small on desktop (960px max on HD+ screens, even 2.5K screens - really?).
It looks like it's made with an off the shelf layout framework without any sort of customization. There's a horrible google calendar embed - why not a simple, integrated solution? There are upscaled(!) PNG logos on there (Chucklefish, Yelp) - why not use a vector file, like decent folk?
Those design patterns are barebones, but work reasonable well on the homepage. However, the moment you click through they seem to be (ab)used for anything and everything. Where are the other, less generalized patterns? And why are the patterns not actually designed for mobile as well? Just dumping all the buttons below each other and making them 100% wide does not make for a good user experience. For that matter, why are there not more effective patterns used? Code example could really use an, oh I don't know, inline code example perhaps? Fortunately, almost all links go to external (sub)sites -without warning- so you won't have to look at this for too long. Just a shame everything looks different from each other, even subsites.
Where are the loving touches? It doesn't have to be a christmas tree, but a little transitions and effects go a long way.
As for the code:
A display font is fine, but preloading six (6!) font weights of the body font, just on the homepage? And not even .woff2 or .woff, but huge .ttf files at that! That's about 3MB of fonts. Nice when you're on 3G; you can see the webpage building up.
It seems to use utility classes. The responsibility for style composition should be in your stylesheets, never in the HTML. The classes look like some clever backend developer cooked them up: "v-top pl4 pl0-l pt0 pt3-l measure-wide-l mw4 mw5-ns w-100 mw-none ph3 mw8-m mw9-l center f3". There, everybody intelligent will immediately know what it does! If you rely on good will for maintenance, this will limit the amount of developers willing to dig in.
Also, there are 4 different CSS files, separated for no apparent reason. Three of which aren't even minified.
SVG illustrations should be placed inline.
As someone with an enmity for big javascript libraries used in the wrong places, the fact that there's no JS should be wonderful. Except that I'm guessing that's part of the reason those design patterns are so barebones.
There's lots more, but let's pick the low hanging fruits first.
PS: I prefer this version: https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/ ;-) It might be stamp-sized visually, but it does some things much better.
Please file bugs! https://github.com/rust-lang/beta.rust-lang.org/issues/new/c...
Some of this is stuff we know, and are tweaking. As the blog post about this says, this is a beta, and we have a lot more work to do. For example, the calendar thing: it's temporary. It's not trivial to style. There's been zero optimization work, which is a lot of what your comment is about. We didn't want to invest in that until we got the big picture stuff down.
It's a sign of the strength of the Rust community that they feel they no longer need to persuade developers. It implies that many developers have already heard about and are interested in Rust, but need higher-ups to approve using it.
management.rust-lang.org and rust-lang.org
I love the use of color, it's very dynamic and "fun", and the typography is nice in my opinion as well. It's more engaging to me, at least.
Any C programmer can see it's factually false, but it could definitely suggest to a C-level exec that they'll have an easier time hiring in the future if they use this language.
The one main objection is the new slogan.
> Rust: The programming language that empowers everyone to become a systems programmer.
They claim it better conveys "what you can do with Rust", but in my opinion being a systems programmer is not more descriptive than the previous statement and it can be read as Rust not being a good choice for anything else than traditional systems programming, which is obviously not true.
Additionally, and this is subjective, I perceive an elitist tone, as in somehow all other programmers should aim to become system programmers, a more elevated type of programmer. I get this is not the intention and I repeat it's subjective, but still.
I'm not a fan of the new website, but it's possible that the intent was to be "with Rust, you don't have to".
Don't make it so hard for people to find the compiler and documentation. You are not going to attract users this way.
When looking at the home page, I don't know what "Get started" is going to take me to, but experience with other sites has given me a bad taste with "Get started" buttons. (The content it leads to here is good, though much of it would have been better put on the front page.)
Personally, I think trying to sell the language on the homepage is the wrong goal. I like language examples on the homepage to make a snap judgement about a language. If I can't see an example, I'm going to assume that there is a reason you don't want me to see it.
If I'm unfamiliar with the language, the things I want are:
* A code example
* A listing of properties of the language (e.g. statically typed, compiled, no gc, memory managed at compile time, etc)
* A command to install it
* A link to a tutorial where I can quickly try out the basics
* A link to the documentation so I can get a sense of its quality
* A link to the github page