Ableton Forum

New forum colours are not that tiring than the old grey design. And with Firefox there are lots of possibilities for own styling.


And for the website, I haven't visited ableton.com in months, why should I? RSS, newsletter, Facebook, KVR is enought to be informed, why bothering with 'websites' any more?

What we are looking at is the magnolia chrysalis of what will become a beautiful phbbutterfly with troll-repellent spots and Tapatalk fronds, which will flit through the meadow of intelligent discourse carrying us all upon its glorious wings!

Hurray for Magnolia!

Is there some way to get rid of that eye-hurting blue (in Safari) ?

I just wrote this in a different thread on the forum:

Logo:

The redesign of the logo is a big step back! I bet you this was the original design of the logo back in the twentieth century. Because that would be the first thing you would come up with, when you try to abstract the core of Ableton Live in a logo. Only it's now left like that, which seems very un-inspirational by the designer and uninspiring for their users.

They took out all the movement of the original logo, which I strongly associated with Live being a music program. If you'd see just the lines now without the word Ableton it could be just about anything... Maybe just some Korean words...

And removing the rounded corners? The rounded corners were giving it it's friendliness. Now, if you already were afraid of the grey (look of Ableton Live), the logo will scare you away for sure! There is nothing human about this logo, anymore.

Also, please don't put this (new) logo on top of an image on your website! It creates an annoying aberration, because of the (imo bad) spacing between the lines, on screen, making the lines look uneven.

Seriously Ableton: It's your logo, the face of the company! You could've put a little bit more thought into this!

Website:

And the site is just OMG. I guess they wanted to give their site a more human touch, indie, niche kind of look, which is obviously the direction Ableton is going with including M4L included in their Suite. But the problem is, that it now looks like it is "designed" by the site programmer himself, instead of a designer.

The colours are maybe a taste issue, but still not related to Ableton Live in any way; so seeming a random choice.

I am however more annoyed by the site navigation and overview. It used to be straight forward and easy to oversee. Now you have to scroll a lot and there is no fast way to navigate to different parts of the site. You always have to scroll (a long way) back to the top to continue.

Readability has become very difficult with some of the background images and wrong colour choices for texts.

To me the website now feels amateurish rather than "special".


I still love Ableton Live to death and I am happy with a lot of the things coming in Ableton Live 9, which is probably why it hurts me even more to see what they are doing to their visual identity!

It was commissioned from a Dutch web company it seems.
Unfortunately that means they proposed this design to Ableton ... and Ableton actually signed off on it, which means they are unlikely to see the error of their decision. Even if they do, they have authorised (signed off on it) So there's no chance for them to say " ah, we just noticed how fugly our shop is, can you do us a modern looking store instead, something which inspires confidence, and says technology and music ... raher than community arts for the mentally disadvantaged 1992 clown trouser salesperson"

They intended their main site to look like this abomination. They signed it off. With a company who do this for money!

All that will happen is some font-size fixes, and minor bug hunting. The giant mess of #0000FF and #00FFFF is here to stay.

I may make a user style for the main site if this is the case

The culprits
http://edenspiekermann.com/en/blog/an-all-new-ableton

Amazing.

I've just got a reply back from support about this mess............

Thanks for your feedback.
>
> The new website is here to stay though.
>
> The old Ableton website and visual ID was old and hadn't been updated for quite some time. Over time things became quite messy with lots of different logos and visual themes to keep in mind with our graphic design. This became very restrictive and made graphic design decisions extremely difficult because of all these elements we needed to keep in mind. With Live 9 and Push we decided to take the opportunity to clean up this mess and launch a new website and visual identity which we feel allows us to present what we have to offer in a better way.
>
> If you have any more questions just let us know and we will be happy to help.

FFS!!!!!!!!!! "A new visual identity"! "Clean up this mess"!!!! I've never really complained about anything Ableton related but this is a joke right???!

@ UnCL0NED
Good post! You hit the nail right on the head.
This website looks very unprofessional compared to the old design.

This is great comedy.

+1000.
Holy Crud is the Abes home page Fugly...
Really ?!? Looks like a site built by a flower shop owner in 1986..

UnCL0NED wrote:I just wrote this in a different thread on the forum:

Logo:

The redesign of the logo is a big step back! I bet you this was the original design of the logo back in the twentieth century. Because that would be the first thing you would come up with, when you try to abstract the core of Ableton Live in a logo. Only it's now left like that, which seems very un-inspirational by the designer and uninspiring for their users.

They took out all the movement of the original logo, which I strongly associated with Live being a music program. If you'd see just the lines now without the word Ableton it could be just about anything... Maybe just some Korean words...

And removing the rounded corners? The rounded corners were giving it it's friendliness. Now, if you already were afraid of the grey (look of Ableton Live), the logo will scare you away for sure! There is nothing human about this logo, anymore.

Also, please don't put this (new) logo on top of an image on your website! It creates an annoying aberration, because of the (imo bad) spacing between the lines, on screen, making the lines look uneven.

Seriously Ableton: It's your logo, the face of the company! You could've put a little bit more thought into this!

Website:

And the site is just OMG. I guess they wanted to give their site a more human touch, indie, niche kind of look, which is obviously the direction Ableton is going with including M4L included in their Suite. But the problem is, that it now looks like it is "designed" by the site programmer himself, instead of a designer.

The colours are maybe a taste issue, but still not related to Ableton Live in any way; so seeming a random choice.

I am however more annoyed by the site navigation and overview. It used to be straight forward and easy to oversee. Now you have to scroll a lot and there is no fast way to navigate to different parts of the site. You always have to scroll (a long way) back to the top to continue.

Readability has become very difficult with some of the background images and wrong colour choices for texts.

To me the website now feels amateurish rather than "special".


I still love Ableton Live to death and I am happy with a lot of the things coming in Ableton Live 9, which is probably why it hurts me even more to see what they are doing to their visual identity!

I cannot even fathom the color choices of this forum...
washed out flesh tone and cyan blue? WTF?

I'm embarrassed to have Germanic heritage now.

Angstrom wrote:
The culprits
http://edenspiekermann.com/en/blog/an-all-new-ableton

Amazing.

arafel wrote: Looks like a site built by a flower shop owner in 1986..

Erik Spiekermann - born 30. Mai 1947

pencilrocket wrote:Apple fanboy can't stay on topic funny.

Who said anything about being a fanboy?

Moronic people can't stay on topic funny.

It doesn't really matter how a website is designed, coded or structured so long as it's easy to get in, quick to load, easy to find all the relevant information that you're looking for, as long as you can find all the menus and navigate the link structure intuitively and (if you're selling something) as long as it's easy to see how much things cost, compare those things and buy those things. Ableton's old website was a bit fusty and boring but it did all the above perfectly well. The new website is garish and shouty and ticks hardly any of those boxes.

It reminds me of websites in the early 2000s where people had just figured out animated web objects and thought that building their sites like works of modern art would impress people. It doesn't!

I don't dislike the new page so much, I am open to new stuff.

But it's a pity that all the community relevant stuff has gone. eg. forum, answers, all the stories about artists using live etc.


And what they did to the forum is so hilarious. Instead of upgrading it to something that you can use on a smartphone we now have eyes-hurt-palooza. To me it really looks as if someone at ableton wants to kill the forum because of all the bullshit going on here.