Death to JavaScript Rock Stars!

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We’ve been listening to your feedback today, about the new jQuery site redesign and one thing has become clear:

Death to JavaScript Rock Stars!

Poor dude didn’t even last 24 hours. We wanted to have some fun with the home page, but this bordered on a little too “extreme” for most tastes.

We plan on bringing some further revisions to the homepage in the future, but in the meantime here’s a quick overhaul, put together by the always-excellent Scott Jehl, that’ll help tide everyone over:

jQuery Homepage

As a token of our appreciation for sticking with the “JavaScript Rock Star” for a day we’ve included a little Easter Egg in the new site. It would be useful if you knew the Konami Code.

Naturally, the whole redesign still has many tweaks that’ll be made over the next couple weeks, especially to individual page fonts, font sizes, and colors.

I want to, once again, thank Scott Jehl for all the hard work that he’s been putting in to the site design – and the excellent Varick Rosete (of nGenWorks and Happy Webbies) for the great illustration that he drew for us.

Here’s to many happy days of rockin’ out with jQuery!

156 thoughts on “Death to JavaScript Rock Stars!

  1. Calvin on said:

    Great job on removing the rockstar, which seemed to imply the opposite of the concise beauty of jQuerv, formerly known as jQuery. :P

  2. I don’t even know what to say, but I’ve been into some little to medium but import graphics projects and part of some real creative design process, nothing really big. I’ve heard and seen a lot of crazy ideas, but far from being not the perfect thing for the jquery branding I think it has some powerful and strong effect, I personally would consider that radical move with the rockstar thing. I know maybe some people even call the police because the crime against their eyes, but isn’t jquery that cool and radical enough to do this?, I almost would bet that this type of design is going to be a trend anytime soon. Why don’t you guys put that design against a real poll and see what we, the jquery fans really want or like? I just love the rad factor of the rockstar! or at least put the old DEVO hat somewhere in this new website! please. no matter what happens, jquery… respect.

  3. Enrique Melendez on said:

    In my opinion, space is expensive and there is too much free space left. You could make less vertical margin and padding, and try to keep the first page with no (or few) vertical scroll…

  4. Pingback: Bram.us » Death to JavaScript Rock Stars!

  5. Well that didn’t last long! I wasn’t particularly keen on it but then I don’t look at the homepage very often so didn’t really bother me that much – nice to see that the community rules though…

    On a separate note, love the Konami Code easter egg!

  6. I liked the old design better and i feel like sitting in a dark room when the page has dark design.

    I used to think the jQuery logo was weird but now after redesign the site it just feels like jquery turned from “write less, do more” to “bling bling” JS library.

    It is still my favourite though.

  7. Matt Kruse on said:

    Much better. I still don’t prefer the dark layout (hard to read), nor do I like the very narrow design (horrible for reading the docs on my widescreen monitor).

    I’ve already fixed the width problem with my own Stylish css, and I may do the same for the dark colors. As long as the content is there, though, I can always fix the styles I don’t like.

  8. Heh! This whole mini-soap-opera has been a bunch of fun!

    I think it would have been be ultra amusing if the Rock Star illustration (the actual character himself) was replaced by a super geeky nerd in a jumper (cardigan) with spectacles! Juxtaposed with the flashy “ROCK STAR” tagline, it would have made me laugh. And, hopefully, angered an even bigger crowd ;)

  9. Pingback: Eric Martin » jQuery.com Redesign Causes Pandemonium

  10. It wasn’t “extreme,” any more than a Crest ad featuring a rock guitarist is “extreme.” It was just silly.

    But thanks for removing it.

  11. Great redesign, but I have a small suggestion. I’m suscripted to plugin’s RSS. Sometimes I get updates on plugins I don’t know (and using a very cryptic names), for example: http://plugins.jquery.com/node/3764. On the old site it was easy to go back to the plugin’s main page, to check some demos, navigate the author’s website etc. But on the new design its difficult even to find a description of what the plugin does. A breadcrum will be useful on this case.

    Keep the good work!

  12. DaftMav on said:

    Score 6039, lol. Now all we need is a lite/brighter version of the design… Bright on dark background makes my eyes bleed and causes headaches. No joke, here’s a good article on it: http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200608/light_text_on_dark_background_vs_readability/
    Apparently there are also people who have the same issue with dark on bright, so if a design uses such high contrast in design, then ideally the site should have stylesheets for both contrast versions.

  13. Bravo on the game and on removing the illustration. I actually really like the color scheme, for what it’s worth.

    And another vote for making radio buttons look like radio buttons.

  14. Steve Goguen on said:

    Thank you.

    I know you guys just wanted to have some fun, and I can’t blame you for that. I guess the lesson to be learned is there are always superficial and opinionated assholes, like myself, who will ruin that fun. :)

  15. Thank you for listening to the community! JQuery is an excellent framework, and I am glad to see that you are so responsive to your users needs. Keep up the great work.

  16. DaftMav on said:

    Sorry for the spamming, but my eyes couldn’t take it any longer so I made a userstyle, since I still want to browse this site. Maybe it’s useful for others, so here’s an easy fix for people with the same bright-on-dark issue: http://userstyles.org/styles/10122
    It makes the black go away, replacing it with a more comfortable blue that still matches with the rest of the site. If it’s still too dark for you then it’s an easy 1 line edit. :)

  17. Reason on said:

    I liked the rock star. You fucking nerds disdain anything resembling a life. Fucking nerds and your emo faggotry.

  18. It’s pathetic if people complain about an image on jquery.com. Don’t they have better and more important things to do? This is just a website, and having a rock star image on the front page doesn’t make jquery any less awesome.

  19. It was defnitely the right decision to get rid of the rock star. And concerning the ester egg: that’s the kind of style and humour that’s unique for jQuery. Really cool!

  20. At first I wasn’t convinced about that rock star thing, but it added some lightweight feel to the front page. Now it looks just dull, not fun anymore. Working with jQuery is fun, and the page should show that.

    Probably many people are just to serious about how a JavaScript library should look like. I would be glad if the rock star would make a come back of sorts.

  21. complainfaginator on said:

    The comments here give an impression that most jQuery users are total complaintFags.
    Anyway, thanks a lot for building this awesome tool.New design looks great.

  22. It’s annoying how the Netflix logo moves to the bottom right when hovering, but the other logos goes straight down without moving over.

  23. Put the rockstar on the blog page. The blog is a non-serious area where you can have fun. The front page of the framework though is where you want to attract as much people as you can rather than alienate a large demographic (people older than 15 and the corporate users.)

  24. antouane on said:

    John; We loved your fun banner.

    We are a very serious company and jQuery is for some of us (some shit developer still prefer prototype or dojo :D) a professionnal tool.

    I think that many people complains but I’m sure that the average thought that was a cool and great banner, but you know it’s always the same : people only post when it’s bad and to complain, not to congratz …

    By the way, for me the design is not so important, it’s the global ergonomy of your website, which is very nice don’t worry ;-)

    Continue this way, you are doing great work and the community is proud to use this nice framework.

    kisses from Belgium

  25. Bohdan Ganicky on said:

    What about some Easter Egg bringing back the Rock Star for us who actually loved it? :)

  26. Thanks for your responsiveness. I still think the site is way too heavy for me–jQuery is all about light&simple and this design just screams “enterprise bloat” somehow–but the rockstar was the single worst thing and it’s great that you heard us out. Personal taste aside (I just didn’t like it), it’s important for me to be able to “sell” jQuery to my boss and to my clients — and that is a sell that is a thousand times easier to make when the site is crisp, straightforward, and professional. I know we’re all rockstars at heart and there should be websites and communities where we can get our Javascript rock-out on… just not on jQuery.com.

    Thanks for listening.

  27. It wasn’t that the image was bad, it was just that it totally didn’t fit with the site. The drawing itself was awesome. I still think the logo doesn’t work for what this is — a Javascript library — but it may grow on me.

    It’s great that you actually listened, so kudos for that.

  28. Daniel on said:

    Line 115 of screen.css needs the width set to 47em (instead of 46) as the secondary and footer navigation is wrapping to a second line.. at least with FF3 on XP..

    Otherwise, the new site is nice.. my only request would be to link the quick API function list to the actual reference pages??

  29. Mike Gale on said:

    I’m really pleased to see this go.

    I’m sure I’m not the only one who would consider ditching jQuery, at least in public, if it leads to accusations of being a “Rock Star”!!

    A points about the web design.

    The text does not change size if the user wants it to.

  30. borlak on said:

    if you’re going to write a javascript library, then naturally you would make sure it works in all browsers, ya? now I know it’s most likely not the library messing up here but whoever wrote the HTML; but someone who is deciding on a library and has to develop on ie6 browsers is going to skip by yours when they see this:
    http://img520.imageshack.us/img520/1761/jqueryie6hw6.png
    just sayin.

  31. Ola Pessoal,

    Realmente o Bolg da um Worload danado no IE6, alem de zuar todo o estilo da pagina, o estilo tenho certeza que é o CSS, mas esse esquema do workload deve ser o javascript do jquery que esta mal-configurado ou mal escrito,,,no FF 2.16 vai bem legal…parabens pelo design novo do site e bons codigos…de CSS também…

    t+

  32. You should use remove() on the feature popups… when you hover over them quickly, the previous popup remains as the new one fades in. If you move back and forth quickly then stop, they will continue to popup and hide long after mouseout!

  33. Great image – I mean the artwork is very very cool.

    But, as others suggested, it wasn’t a good fit for jQuery IMO.

    Thanks for taking it down – some bosses/clients out there wouldn’t understand – and sometimes its hard already to sell ‘open source’ to them.

    Thanks … for the best JS library in the world :)

  34. Pingback: The Javascript RockStar Dude Is Dead. Long Live The Konami Code! | ajb{log}: learn something new each day

  35. I had no problem with rock star and ninjas stuff. Largely because i do not care.

    What i care about is usability. It seem like the worse usability feature right now are the popups that occur on mouse over following text:
    * Light weight
    * Cross-browser
    * CSS compliant

    Not only they hide the actually text making hard to understand which popup refer which text, but also they overlap other text resulting in confusion.

  36. ohh good grief. It was a graphic for goodness sakes. GET OVER IT FOLKS! I actually liked it. It gave me a chuckle, and anyone that whined and complained about it needs to get out and get some kind of a life. I don’t think you should have caved on this one. Screw the masses! That’s what makes a true rockstar! Ya don’t like it? Go use mootools or something. Jquery is for true coding rockstars, not stiff as a board nerds!

    Next time have a graphic with a dude holding up his skateboard shaped keyboard labeled: “code or die” or something corny like that. I vote bring the rockstar back!