I'd like to add some constructive criticism and maybe some assistance in the right direction. I think Darkcoin could use a new site, a new wallet splash page, and some additional marketing material but before everyone goes off doing their own thing in order to claim bounties I think the Darkcoin brand needs to be setup. Darkcoin needs an official logo. Along with this a branding guide. Color schemes need to be set in stone. An official font needs to be chosen, a font size, font weight, etc. There needs to be a model from which all additional marketing materials are created from. Without this in place you do not have a brand. The coin will be stuck in the same place it's in right now as far as marketing goes.
By no means am I trying to say that any work done so far is not quality work. I'm only suggesting that brand guidelines be set so that everyone's work focuses on advancing the Darkcoin name.
Think about Coca-Cola, Dr. Pepper, Pizza Hut, the Bitcoin 'B' icon, etc... Every recognizable company has a set branding guideline.
http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/brand_guidelines_tpa_nov_2008.pdfI couldn't agree with you more. In an ideal world I'd just hire a marketing group to handle that for us, however we don't have the budget for that. So we're sourcing all of this work from the community, with incentives via bounties. If someone with branding experience steps up to coordinate the effort, that would be fantastic and I'd say yes in a heartbeat. In the meantime, we're taking the approach of throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. Or at least, that's what we're doing with the logo. We've had a lot of user-submitted logos generated, and I'm thinking about redirecting the existing logo bounty towards paying for a set of crowdsourced logo designs, which the community can then all vote on. Personally I'm of the view that logo should drive the rest of the design & colour scheme. We're not exactly following that methodology right now because of time & resource constraints, but I'm trying to move us in that direction.
Roughly this is how I see Darkcoin's brand progressing:
Crowdsourced logos (e.g. from designcrowd.com) --> Community votes on logo --> Generate branding guide --> Generate additional graphics --> Customise WP template for site
How do you know we don't have the budget for this? For $10k, you can get one of the top branders in the world to come up with a world-class logo and extended color pallete. We came up with 2200 DRK when you issued a bounty address with no specific direction. Give it a specific direction and you'll get much more funding. One thing that is hard for most developer/techy people to understand is that logos and design are not done best when crowdsourced and voted on. Most people don't actually know what is appealing design and how their subconscious filters images. The work is often much much better when the control is given to a master artist with a vision for how the company should appear visually. The payoff is also orders of magnitude better, as our eyes and subconscious are extremely critical and selective, considering we are bombarded with 100's of garbage logos and the bland design we run accross everyday, where most companies didn't allow enough for a marketing budget.
What people are trying to say is, the logo and design quality MATTER, like BIG TIME. Don't settle for anything less than the absolute best we can get. And we can find a way to get the best.