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UPDATED (December 24) Blender site design
I’m Courtny, senior product designer at Stack Overflow! I’m super happy for this community, because we have started on your site's design.
Your Site Design
The idea of the design is a reflection of the Blender site's subject and culture. This will help brand your site as unique, even while you share common elements with other sites as part of the bigger Stack Exchange family.
Design Concept
For the Blender site design and branding, we wanted to integrate a number of the great community ideas as well as give this site a unique presence on the network. We looked for inspiration that was simple and true to the Blender brand and product. We've gathered some artwork we found online for setting up a mood board.
Moodboard

Color Scheme
Overall, we wanted to stay true to the Blender brand colors that the community is familiar with.

Logo
For the logo, you can see that we have created a glyph and word mark combination inspired heavily by the official Blender logo (Shout out to gandalf3 for suggesting such a good concept!). The original logo is iconic to the community, and with the additional tweaks we've converted the "eye" glyph into a question bubble. Truly a mashup of the Q+A / Blender metaphors.
For the word mark, we decided to use an entirely new typeface. Not straying too far from the Blender branding, we chose Open Sans Condensed.

Primitive Pattern
One design component we really wanted to integrate into the community branding of this site were the core primitive meshes. These meshes are used by millions everyday in Blender to create amazing things. Of the 10 core primitives, one in particular stands out: Suzanne the Monkey. This would also make a nice holiday gift wrapping paper...but we're getting ahead of ourselves!

Swag
Here is how the community branding would be applied to a sampling of swag items.

Site Design
And last but not least, the site design! Click on the image to view at full resolution.

We believe the design and branding work very well for this community. We’d love to hear your feedback! If there are no major design changes, we’ll launch the new site design.
Congratulations!

EDIT - December 24th, 2015
Thank you for all of your input. We've made some changes based on the community's initial feedback.
Logo
There were enough people who weren't in love with the logo execution that we decided to revisit the design. We know that we won't be able to please everyone, but at the same time, we want you to feel good about the site and the community you've worked to build.
We explored a few different directions and landed on the execution below for the following reasons:

Clearly indicate that the logo is for the Blender.se community.
This concept still maintains character of the familiar Blender official logo.
Integrate the concept of Q&A speech bubbles, without overtly recycling the Stack Exchange master bubble.
No more socket, yay!

More to come after the new year. Have a great holiday everyone!

Looks nice, but... Will it blend?

The blue polygon looks awesome!

This is the question that I supposedly answered in the screenshot of the activity page. That question has 0 answers, not 4, and I do not have 511 rep! That screenshot was doctored!

The coloring is totally awesome. the links, top, bottom, everything is perfectly colored! I also love the picture of the hills of Stackexchangia for the moodboard :-)

Seriously? Asked yesterday, asked 3 years ago?

@NormalHuman The Stack design team handles site designs. A member of the team is assigned a site (In this case, me), and that individual works with Jin Yang (Creative Director) to produce the design. Generally, other designers on the team are involved in the internal feedback process as well. Once Jin green lights the designer's work, it is pitched to the community!

YES! I love it :)
The only thing which bothers me a little is the text in the socket, which feels "squished" to me. Perhaps I'm just too used to the wide font used in the original blender socket.. I know blender.org uses open sans condensed, but tbh that bothers me too :P But before I get carried away nitpicking, let me say again how beautiful this is. And I would totally use that as a wrapping paper ;)

Thanks @gandalf3! I had a hard time myself when familiarizing myself with the original Blender logo for so long...and then going to this more condensed typeface for the word mark. Overall, it's grown on me. It's different enough from the Blender logo that it is obviously a unique execution...while being similar enough to retain the original's essence.

The logo seems a bit round, perhaps Ton would let you use the real logo?

Do we get a mock up for the appearance of chat?

@GiantCowFilms We usually wait for that once the dust settles from feedback on the first pitch and design tweaks have been made to main site design.

Alright that makes sense

Looks great!  The one thing that bothers me is the socket font, it just seems a little strange though I can't pinpoint exactly what.  I'm not saying it should be the same as Blender's, just something seems slightly "off", but that's a minor point.  I especially love the use of Suzanne, especially the badges.  I also agree with iKlsR below about the custom tags and more triangulation.

My only critique would be the logo. I don't think it looks different enough from the blender logo that people would understand it represents something different and that the blender foundation hasn't simply released a new official logo.

The logo font is actually starting to grow on me, but I still feel like it's a bit too condensed. I'm curious how it would look with open sans, instead of open sans condensed. I think Ray has a point about the logo possibly seeming too similar to the Blender logo, but I think I'd rather take the chance. I personally like the way that it reflects the Blender logo while still being different.

Just a heads up, there's now a dedicated chat room for extended discussion of the design.

This is looking much better! I still have one small nit-pick (sorry). The L in Blender is really bothering me, I think the mixture if the different height and different slope are what is doing it. Not sure if that is something you guys noticed as well. That is really the only thing I can find.

The new logo is great!  @HATMAN I actually really like the slant on the l and d.

Perhaps the l and d should also be as tall as the B or use a common b? Not a biggie really, could grow on us. Other than that this looks fantastic, I'm all for seeing this everyday.

The latest looks fresh. Thumbs up!

Aw, I'm sad to see no pocket, but the logo looks much better! I also agree with @HATMAN about the slant, I think it would look better without it. I also think that it should be the same height as the rest of the text. Other than that, this is looking great!

Parkinson's law of triviality will come into effect soon :)

Yes, this logo is perfect! Very good work. I don't find any negatives, all the changes really pushed it forward. Side by side the new logo also has character and looks much more mature now.

STATUS UPDATE [12/17/15]
Hello everyone. This is Courtny again. I wanted to provide a quick update on status.
Overall, the community has some excellent feedback that I believe will make the design stronger. It seems like the chatter has died down mostly, so I've combed over all suggestions and comments. I wanted to list the highlights that I will be taking into consideration and incorporating into the next design round.
Logo

Probably the biggest amount of feedback was on the logo itself, and rightly so. It's almost too similar to Blender's official. Here is what I'm looking at doing:

Make the stem on the bubble more pronounced; visually make it appear more like a speech bubble.
Plenty of people seemed to like David's first design idea. I will take a stab at trying to more closely associate with the SE bubble concept.
Don't use Blenders condensed typeface
Adjust the socket drastically, or simply remove it entirely.
Incorporate "Stack Exchange" into the word mark. This will be a similar execution as was done over on the Salesforce SE site.

Header Background

Adjust the feathering on the header to be mo' betta. This would likely mean increasing it's width horizontally, or creating a polygonal pattern that will actually repeat (ideal).
Enhance the vibrance/hinting on the triangulation in order to bring out the mesh work more.

Miscellaneous Site Elements

Badges: Revise the Suzanne glyph per gandalf3's suggestions. Basically, want to have a more recognizable/visually appealing representation of Suzanne at small sizes.
Badges: Attempt to pixel hint the badges [SVG].
Badges: Use different glyphs for each badge type: (Bronze Cube / Silver Sphere / Gold Suzanne)
Tag Styling: Don't round them off, make them more "Blender" like. Consistently size them everywhere (design oversight on first round, sorry!)
Buttons: Not rounded.
Primitives: Going to play with updating a these to maintain accurate perspective. Original was a stylistic choice on purpose, but I'll see how a new batch looks per suggestions.

What's the timeline on the next round? I'm going to try and get a second pass of the design concepts up by the Holiday break. Expect to see something (late) next week!

Great to hear from you again! I think you really condensed all our thoughts into some very actionable goals. I am excited for the next version :)

How are you making the polygon background? It seems like it shouldn't be too hard to make it tileable

What buttons are you talking about here when you say "Buttons: Not rounded." Because I quite like the vote buttons the way the are in the design.

Everything you said sounds great!

Thanks for sticking with us in our quest for the right design. Being a community of mostly artists and creatives I know we're not all easy to please. As I type this I am imagining how tough the Graphic Design SE site design process must have been - although well worth the end result. Regarding the primitives, how about just using the pattern that gandalf3 made? I don't think we need to fix it if it's not broken. Or is there a rule that all final artwork must be created internally? As far as the logo goes, I like the concept of m.ardito's recent designs and I'd be curious to see your version.

@GiantCowFilms I was manually generating it in photoshop. If you're keen to let me know of another, better way to do it I'm all ears!

@Courtny Well I personally would use blender (Surprise), but If you're not already a user, it will probably be too time consuming to learn (Although once you know how, it is super easy). I will experiment with photoshop.

@GiantCowFilms No worries. I was just wondering if I could quickly do it in Blender or something with a helpful tip! I've got it pretty much covered (using a mixture of Illustrator and Photoshop).

Should be pretty quick in blender, I can write up instructions when I have some time later today.

@GiantCowFilms Thank you

@Courtny Okay, here is a quick proof of concept test (its tiled 4x sideways). The result is tweak-able, and can produce better results with a bit of extra work.

@GiantCowFilms WOW this will be perfect! I think we can run with this!!!

@Courtny Okay, here is an answer, if you get stuck (I can miss steps sometimes) just ping me in chat, and I can help you and improve the answer: http://blender.stackexchange.com/a/45383/3127

I like this a lot. Here's my quick feedback
CC

At the core of 3d, we work with raw polygons, everything seems too round, logo (I slightly prefer the original here), ask button etc
The header seems a bit bland but that could just be me
Other than the subtle background and the logo addition, nothing much seems to have been changed really

What I'd like to see

Custom upvote/downvote icons, really like the idea of using Blender's +/- icons for this and perhaps the checkbox for accepted
Custom badges (monkey heads anyone?)* These seem to look like Suzanne when viewed with perspective, use the orthographic front view which will make it appear not as long near the bottom
Special <pre> styles that match Blender's buttons (if possible, not sure SE's current stance on samp), another useful post Guidelines on the usage of StackExchange Markup and style
Custom tags* (tags matching the above ^ style would be nice as well)
Less rounded edges
Perhaps some more triangulation for the header and footer background, the overall look just feels.. a bit empty

*Blender site design ideas - input welcome!
Other than that, I like the direction this is heading. +1 for the minimalistic look and color palette.

@iKlsR Thank you for your quick feedback! I wanted to address one of your suggestions since internally we’ve begun work on standardizing core components of the SE network.
The up vote / down vote / accepted controls are core UI components to the SE network. As such, our product team is attempting to standardize their base display among all sites. This allows us to roll out network wide changes easier, as well as ensuring consistency among  user experience across any of our sites.

I definitely agree about the logo. I think having a sharper point at the bottom would look better. I don't really agree about bringing in icons from the Blender UI though. I personally think that that would end up looking quite ugly in the context of the rest of the site.

Maybe something that would help with making the triangulation stand out more (and possibly bringing in the mood of working with meshes more), would be to outline the edges in a very subtle light blue.

@DalekMaker Was just throwing some ideas out, these don't necessarily have to take that exact look seeing that they come from a darker themed interface for one.

All great suggestions!

I'm so happy this moment is finally here!
Having already expressed my initial enthusiasm for the design, I'll jump straight to the nit-picking ;)
My 2¢
Header imagery
I agree with iKlsR's comment about the header, I too feel like it's slightly barren.
There was talk of having a "render of the week" meta post (photo.se style). Or some kind of contest, if not quite that.
Perhaps the winning image could be put in the header on a weekly basis and shown off to everyone?

Suzanne icon
Regarding the perspective/orthographic Suzanne badges, there was some question as to whether the Suzanne icon is recognizable enough.
Here's a comparison between the new, perspective Suzanne badges, and my orthographic concept badges  (just ignore the poor colors on mine :P)

Note the perspective gives the slightest hint of the eyebrow things (which are not visible in the orthographic version), but almost entirely loses the ears.
The orthographic version doesn't have any hint of the eyebrows, but shows the ears nicely. That said not everyone saw ortho Suzanne right away either.
Apologies for picking on you @PGmath, but it seems you are the only existing B.SE user with all three classes of badge to be themed with the new site theme so far :)
Just for a larger-than-tiny reference, here's a perspective Suzanne and an orthographic Suzanne both shaded and flat:

Perhaps since many Suzanne images have Suzanne sitting on a surface (and therefore rotated backwards so as to sit flat), the silhouette would be more recognizable if there was a slight backwards rotation.
Here's Suzanne rotated 20° backwards and at a longish focal length (40mm from about 4 meters away) so there still with some perspective, but not quite as much as the wide-angle shot from before.

With some rotation both the eyebrows and the ears are nicely apparent.
Now the question is which is most recognizable as Suzanne at icon size:

I personally find 1. more recognizable, but 3. more aesthetically pleasing (however I'm not sure I could tell it was Suzanne if I didn't already know).

Tag style consistency
I noticed the "related tags" at the bottom don't match the normal tags.

It might be confusing to have tags styled differently in different parts of the site.

Pattern perspective
I noticed that the perspective on objects in background pattern seems inconsistent.
The cube, plane, and suzanne appear to have some perspective distortion, while the rest look fairly orthographic.
I realize these are probably intended to be more stylized than accurate, but to me it feels rather strange. So I had a go at making a mock-up of all-ortho primitives, and added some flat lighting for fun:

The logo
Many have already commented about the logo, but here's my own thoughts:

I find the point perhaps too rounded. While the arms on the blender logo are indeed quite round, most speech bubbles seem to have sharper points. Combined with some vague resemblance to the letter q, I like having a more pronounced "stem".
Maybe it's just me, but the socket seems rather "puffy" (too much padding).
I personally like it better when the padding is less thick than the white circle within the logo itself.
Regarding distinguishing from blender.org, it's true that it really looks just like the blender logo when placed in the socket with text saying just "blender". However I think this is more the fault of the text, and not something that can be easily remedied by changing the logo.
To an outsider there is no real concrete indication of what this logo represents, aside from the text. Especially when seen in contexts outside of the site itself, e.g. here.
I think attempting to communicate that this logo refers to the Q&A site through the logo alone isn't practical, especially when it's placed next to text which sends an ambiguous if not contradictory message.
Would it be completely out of the question to change our site name to something more distinctive, e.g. something like "blender QA" (as suggested by @iKlsR) or "AskBlender" (like AskUbuntu)? Or if not actually change the site's name, could a tagline or some other little extra text be worked in to avoid our "brand image" literally reading exactly like the blender logo?

#1 Suzanne looks awesome! (the other two are horrifically ugly!)

@X-27 Suzanne? Ugly!? ;)

the other two Suzannes are squashed circles with a blob underneath. #1 actually looks like Suzanne.

On the subject of orthographic rendering, I think the all the wire graphics on the T-shirt would look better in orthographic, as well as the Suzanne

@GiantCowFilms Most of them look orthographic (e.g. the cylinder and the torus), but others have more perspective (e.g. plane and cube). I too thought that was a little odd

No apology necessary, you're not "picking" on me!  I didn't originally notice anything wrong with the original Suzannes, but looking at yours now I definitely think they ortho ones are better.

I really like the "render of the week" idea too.

@X-27 #2 and #3 ugly, and coming from you? Both 2 and 3 look like nuclear explosions! (or mushrooms)

@David no, this is a proper nuclear badge. Maybe that will go on Ballistics.SE proposal....

I love the askblender idea.

Ask Blender would look  better like I wrote it, Capitalized, with a space. Also, What about dropping the socket, and making the text white?

Huge improvement on the background pattern icons!

+1 for changing the logo text or an all together different name!

@GiantCowFilms That would probably look nice on the site, but in places with a white background that wouldn't work..

I preferred it with all lowercase, or just blender. No uppercase please.

Ask Blender doesn't roll off the tongue that well.

@iKlsR Agreed it's not exactly perfect.. But I can't think of any others I like any better :/

@gandalf3 http://discuss.area51.stackexchange.com/questions/6018/replace-the-existing-blenderqa-site-or-augment I kinda liked that name

@iKlsR Not bad! It certainly rolls of the tongue better, no need for an ampersand really.

I really like what you guys have come up with, it looks really great! I think this theme represents the community and the program very well. I like the polygonal backgrounds for the headers and footers, and the idea of having the mesh primitives as a background I absolutely love.
A few thoughts:

The logo text feels a bit cramped, a condensed font might not be the best choice
The blue might be just a tad too saturated
The background almost feels cluttered, maybe a little less contrast or a fade would help
The view count and date posted text seems to clash with the style a little, the contrast of new minimalistic and all-caps boldface seemed a little odd to me

I agree with most of the What I'd like to see points iKlsR made as well however I kind of like the non-capitalized Blender text.

Retracted that point, don't know what I was thinking.

I waited a bit till my opinion settles a little, so here are my feelings:

the design won't offend, but also won't enthuse. It's very basic like other SE sites. But other SE sites have something unique to give them personality, the polygon background is very generic. The only personality we get is from the grey pattern, which is similar like chemistry's SE background and not very noticeable.
logo is nice at first impression, but the longer I see it the less I like it. Mostly because of the font and how aligned/mis-aligned things are.
Icon is like Blender had a baby with 9CHAT:

I don't think Blender's logo is a miracle and for example the perspective distortion shouldn't be copied. That's a bad design thing in a logo.
The font is a no-go for me. Optically the text is not placed well. It works for the bl part, not so much for the ender part - too much white around and too much on top of text. Makes the left-side of logo seem fuller and the right-side seem emptier with text too much at bottom (the right-side is not centered around the half-circle). If you see the original Blender logo the letters have not that different height and there is bigger white margin at bottom than on top, which works better. I blame the chosen font.

The logo is also very similar to Blender's logo which is not a bad thing on itself, but combined with a generic and simple background it gives an impression of Blender Foundation site and not a Stack Exchange site. I don't think you want that. Rather tone the Blender logo similarity down a bit, and give the other design elements more personality (like the primitive pattern has).
The Suzanne badges don't work at all. They are too small for the silhouette to work. They look like some crooked displaced T's. Something I don't want to have as a badge (Suzanne yes but this is no Suzanne).
The colors also don't work. What about some shading, stroke and a bit of pixel-art highlights to make it look more expensive like this:

I think this can be accomplished in a 12x12 icon.
Fair point would be not to make it look too arcade-ish. Also line-art looks good with single color, but not shapes with large body in my opinion.

I am probably just missing some stroke around the Suzanne badges though:

Now what I would love and probably won't have is a darker color scheme. All the software I work with is dark themed. When I open SE site it is shock for my eyes, not a pleasant one.
I know you have to follow SE white design for consistency, but this site is for people who work in dark themed programs's mostly. Give it a thought and please give us the darkest design you can. For example when I go to BlenderArtists it's much easier on my eyes than SE.

For the text I imagine something like the bottom left. And the site background and header being a darker tone. The site doesn't have to be white text on dark, but as it is now the bright white is too painful.

I love your answer, and totaly agree with all of your points except for the dark site. I said something very similar back when gandalf suggested the suzanne badges. Here was my idea for the badges, still suzanne but a more common shape. (Are my logo ideas any better?)

I agree about keeping it a bit darker, but not dark dark (like what most of us use in Blender). I think your bottom left one is good.

"this site is for people who work in dark environment's mostly" - I know the whole post is just opinion, but that was said like it was a fact, which it really isn't.

@RayMairlot sorry I meant program dark environments. Blender is dark, everything from Adobe is dark, Zbrush is dark, most 3D apps and tools are dark.

@Jerryno Dark backgrounds are EVIL for long paragraphs, unless you turn down the contrast massively, which looks just plain awful.

I wholeheartedly agree with you about the logo. Whatever 9chat is, it has no business making babies with Blender, lol. But I feel (and people will stone me to death for saying this) that we shouldn't have Suzanne badges, or Suzanne anywhere ...with the one exception being Gandalf's background pattern icons, which are very tastefully done and Suz is presented as what she is: a prim object (not a idol to worship, or the main theme of Blender).

+1 for dark background. I know I'm likely in the minority, but I've themed my entire desktop around a darker, easy on the eyes look. Most websites (BSE included) present a sharp and uncomfortable contrast. I've learned to live with it (perhaps I'll make a userstyle sometime), but having a native dark theme (or even a softer light theme) would give it a more welcoming and comfortable feel imo.

Regarding the logo, I always thought the subtle hint of perspective in the blender logo was rather clever. Blender has everything to do with 3D, and the logo reflects that in a very subtle way (no huge bevels etc) which works well even when icon size. Granted, we aren't trying to make the blender logo here, but I thought I'd throw my opinion around nonetheless :) Perhaps it would look less like "9chat" if it had a slight twist? Or even with the stem on the other side?

@gandalf3 Even when there is a resemblance with 9chat I don't think we will come up with anything better than you original design (which I like more than this rounded version). I think the problem is with the font and the socketing. The white socketing also helps the 9chat logo resemblance, your original icon is fine. I am definitely for a softer light theme, this one is so white it can't be any more white..

My thoughts

The header and footer are great! Good colors in the pattern. (I do agree with GiantCowFilms' thoughts in the pattern edges.)
I'm very curious to see what the mock up for the meta looks like. I would be in favor of a desaturated blue for the header and footer, instead of the common grey scale.
The overall colors of the text, links, vote buttons, and tags are great! I'm very happy to see a better contrast for the hover color. What does the hover state look like for the main links? (pictured below)
I do not like the shape of the badges, perhaps we have taken the "almighty" suzanne too far. I for one want to be able to say I have 6 gold badges, not gold suzannes. What if (for example) we use a different primitive for each badge?
What font is the body text? (I find it less readable then the current Arial)

A some what minor point: I don't like the site background "Primitive Pattern." It looks too childish with the the thick lines. The good part is the grey on lighter grey it is not too noticeable. :)  (However it looks great on the T-shirt.)

The logo
My big sticking point is the logo. I do not like the logo, at all.
It looks like just a odd blender logo copy. We are very much a part of the blender community, yet we are separate from blender. We should have our own distinctive logo.
Look how similar the two logos are. Especially when it is wrapped in the white outline, it looks

Instead, here are some example logos my brother and I made:

This first logo stays true to the shape that was already defined in our mock up logo, and found in many other sites across the network. The horizontal stripes pay homage to the SE logo. The colors are taken from the blender logo. A modern logo that mixes the familiar blender colors with a bold SE styled shape.

This logo is fully inspired from within blender. The icon is an adaptation of blender's familiar material icon. Again the colors are taken from the blender logo.

This logo is what happens when you take the the blender colors in the shape of the material icon, and spin it, as if it were in a kitchen blender. Which makes a fun an unique logo.

Here is a variant in the blender type white outline. Yet this may be straining too far towards another familiar blender logo.
I can upload the SVGs for the logos if anybody is interested.

So all in all I quite like the way you are headed with the overall design. (For me this is rather similar to how movies' logo played out.)
PS while we are talking about our new site, might we be able to get blend file hosting?

I don't know.. I for one would much rather have gold Suzannes ;) Interesting idea with the multi-primitive badges. gd.se did something like this. I like the top logo concept, but it doesn't work as well against the background imo. The pinwheel idea is interesting, but I'm not sure I like the kitchen blender analogy. This isn't a site for kitchen blenders (even if we do get questions about them..) +1 for file hosting :)

I like the idea of the different primitive badges. Maybe it would be something like a cube, then a sphere, then a Suzanne? Bronze, Silver and Gold respectively. I think that this would be a way to give better levels to badges. It would make it feel like more of an achievement to get a gold badge, because not only is it a different color, and counted in a different category, but you also get Suzanne to go along with it.

For the logo, I don't really like your last few ideas. They just doesn't feel like they have a strong enough foundation in Blender, or SE. While I get where your getting the inspiration from, It's just not a direction that I think is worth taking. I think that there might be somewhere to go with your first suggestion though. Something to experiment with might be to keep the shape, but also add in the "core" from the Blender logo. Then making the outside orange, but keeping the inside blue (helps keep the color scheme a bit more friendly), and then the white padding can stay.

Your first idea for the logo looks great, the second looks awesome. the last two are horrific, as  in Really Bad (I'd edit them out of my post if I were you) But- Your first two logo concepts are Really Good I'd say even better than the logo the designers made for us!

@DalekMaker I woud want a bronze sphere, a silver cube, and a gold Suzanne. because, in all seriousness, cubes are way better then spheres. They have fewer polygons, which makes it easier on the BGE. Cubes are nicely shaped, while spheres are so ... round! I would not mind replacing the gold Suzanne with a golden mech, but Suzanne might be more familiar to most of the users.

I like the Suzannes, don't take them away! I agree our logo could use a touch up, making the shape more distinctive, however most of those other suggestions are cringe worthy (sorry to be so harsh).

The first logo could be really good, the third one could with some work. The second one is a bit 2000's though. Clashes with the rest of the site a bit

I'm not one to mince words, so I am being blunt with my criticisms. I think the designers did an excellent job on this and I am just nit picking.
The polygon background seems to fade off on the sides:

I can see why this was considered a good design, however, I think the background should either extend all the way, or at least have a wider feather, extending out more. This one is minor and quite subjective.
I also want to point out that the font spacing could be a bit wider.
Alot of other people mentioned this, but the logo is two rounded. I think it could be pushed more towards the shape of the stack exchange logo, specifically using a pointed end. In combination with the fonts it looks slightly childish.
The coaster/mouse pad thingies (if they are mice pads, they should be square, a round mouse pad will be  annoying).
The big thing with them is the un-motivated gradient. It makes the corners feel chopped off, and would work much better for a square. I think the better options would be a) ditch the gradient or b) change it a little.
I first thought a centered radial gradient, going out, would work, but that might look odd. How about a radial gradient, but a little bit closer to the bottom, like the one on the left:

These might need a bit of tuning, but the idea is there.
Note: Reject suggestions 2 and 3 on the image if you guys go for square, they only help with round.

Good suggestion! I was informed by Jin that mousepads will probably never happen (we actually have some SE branded circular ones) but it's not a standard swag item, just something fun to show off.

@Courtny Awww! I wanted a mouse pad, the one I currently have is looking on the old side, and wearing thin...

I know :( I spilled coffee on my SE one yesterday and ruined it. Also, circles do suck as mousepads.

@GiantCowFilms Mine too :/ Its so old it was probably made when mice used mechanical spheres.. Re. the background fade, it looks to me that it fades on both sides. Or am I missing something..?

@gandalf3 it does, I just didn't need to draw to boxes.

The polygon background seems to fade off on the sides

@gandalf3 My mouse pad nearly pre-dates me....... so yeah, its old.

@Courtny Shoot!  I wanted a mouse pad too.  (My current one is over a decade old and disintegrating into powder all over my desk.)

I totally agree- looks horrific fading out at the end. (I may be slightly over stating that a bit) but you do have a good point.

Swag makers take note: mouse pads are in high demand!

Since I think the site logo as it stands is very close to the Blender logo, and doesn't really convey the Stack Exchange aspect, I took a shot at making something to more effectively communicate both ideas.
Against a blue preview background:

Download the .blend

With no background (transparent):

Download the .blend

With a third dimension:

Download the .blend

I find it on the ugly side and prefer some of @gandalf3's alternate suggestions.

@GiantCowFilms That's not really helpful critique. What don't you like about it? What ideas of Gandalf's do you prefer?

I prefer some designs that gandalf posted elsewhere (still WIP), the final output should appear on main. I cannot really give helpful feedback on the current design since I don't see how it can be improved sufficiently without fundamentally changing it . . .  Sorry to be so brutal but to me at least it feels like its just a bad idea - no room for improvement.

@GiantCowFilms Well you have the right to hate it, but that still doesn't get us any closer to getting a logo that communicates "Blender + SE". David and TARDIS Maker came close, but David's kind of resembles a country's flag more than the Blender logo, and TARDIS Maker's looks like tire marks have streaked through it. (No offense, guys) I think having a balanced blend of both logos makes it easily understood at a glance - as a remix of existing symbols rather than just the Blender logo with two of its appendages missing. Hopefully someone can come up with something that people won't hate.

Yes, I agree... I was merely saying this isn't the best choice, but thank you for throwing your idea in. Sometimes I feel like design can b a bit of a chance game where you just need to keep chucking more ideas until you strike lucky. Hopefully with this many people taking enough shots we will succeed!

@GiantCowFilms Cheers. I'm going back to the drawing board and looking over the icons in the SE site list, and realizing that from the standpoint of being easy to recognize within that list at a small size, the present icon is actually well-suited. When I saw the concept stickers, t-shirts, etc I thought: "Nobody who sees this on a shirt will know what it is". But now I'm inclined to think that looking good in that list is the higher priority. Still considering possibilities...

@Mentalist You nailed it regarding the site list. We design for considerations of our primary use cases (digital format, small sizes, needs to be unique, but not completely unfamiliar to a user who only knows the Blender brand). Design intent is not to abstract it so far that we lose that connection with our passer-by visitors. In fact, we'd rather like them to stay a while and take a second glance ;)

Nice job! Overall, I like it.
I think I mostly agree with everyone. I've already expressed that in a few comments.
The logo
I quite like the logo idea, but it's just too rounded. As some others have said, it feels a bit childish. Kind of like it's a safety logo.
I prefer the original:

Some people say that it's a bit too similar to the Blender logo, and are afraid that people will come here and think that this is an official Blender site. While they have a valid point, I think that it should be fairly easy to tell it apart just based off of the content.
I think they're also forgetting that when you aren't logged on, there are several sections that explain what the site is about.

Home Page

Question
I think that's enough of a disclaimer.
To me, the most important thing when it comes to that, is that people don't expect to be able to come here to download Blender. That they can immediately tell that this is a Q&A site, and not the official Blender web site.
Weather it looks like "official" Blender isn't really important, imo.
Now, I did make a logo based off of @Davids first idea based off of the SE logo. It didn't really turn out all that great, but I thought I'd post it just in case it gives anyone any ideas.

I'll probably experiment a bit more with it also.
Badges
I definitely want Suzanne Badges. I also like the idea of having each type of badge be a different primitive. Like I already said, something like having bronze be a cube, silver a sphere, and gold be Suzanne. This isn't important though. Just a fun thing to have.

I like bronze be a cube, silver a sphere, and gold be Suzanne!

bronze sphere, sliver cube, and gold Suzanne!

The logo idea isn't work too well. In my opinion the lines aren't really working. I think we are forgetting that they are supposed to communicate "Stack" as in stackexchange. Currently they just look like stripes.

@GiantCowFilms Yeah, I agree with you. I just posted in the case that it might give people ideas. Although did this need a DV because you didn't like the mockup logo, when there is a lot of other stuff here also?

@TARDISMaker I have not DV'd

@GiantCowFilms Okay, sorry.

With respect to the word mark, I don't have any particular preference for any of those suggested, and have the same problem with all of them: I think the label should specify that the word mark is for "Blender Stack Exchange", and not for "Blender" by adding the words "stack exchange", or the SE symbol to the word mark.

Yeap! We're going to head in a similar direction as we did over on the Salesforce community and incorporate "Stack Exchange" into the word mark to ensure we are concise.

I just thought about a logo variation, quickly sketched in two slightly different styles, here, if this can help somehow:

added another,

The one on the bottom won't work when small, and "SE" is a rather vague term outside of certain contexts. The above logos, with the questions marks, are off balance, and are visual confusing. They give the impression of reaching down to pic something off the floor. Overall I'm not terribly fond of all these mashups.

I love it! I think we should add something about fluid simulation to the mood board. I know it might go against the minimalistic theme, but I think it would very cool!

Why fluid sim? That isn't what blender is known for (The fluid sim is probably the weakest out of all the simulation engines). If we represent that, we'd probably want to add smoke sim, cloth sim, the game engine the compositor... the list of blender functions is endless. I think it might be best to stick to the basics. :D

I understand your point about we would have to include all the other sims, but I maybe I am the only one who finds the fluid sim so fascinating! I just spend most of my time in between projects just messing around with it... XD.
Just my opinion

Just another logo idea...

Download the .svg

I would actually say this would be a better recommendation for general 3D site or something. It isn't very blender specific. Furthermore I find the design noisy, it looks terrible small and is generally confusing. However, I do like the concept of the arrow controls. I think this may need some work, but it is not without potential.


text:
Blender site design: Captcha / 404 / Error page - input needed!
We are working on finishing touches for the site design, and one of the fun parts is coming up with the design concepts for the 404 / Error / Captcha pages. We generally like to have metaphors closely tied to the site's primary area of focus.
So, what concepts or or ideas would you like to see for each of these pages related to Blender? If you have any clever ideas, we'd love for you to help us out!
Examples of custom 404/error/captchas:
Chemistry 404
Chemistry Error
Chemistry Captcha

@MrZak Thanks for contributing!

Maybe a bit unimaginative.. But for the "something bad happened" page, perhaps some kind of 3D model gone wrong could work

For 404, a classic "not found" situation in blender is when missing textures cause objects (or even the sky) to turn bright pink. Perhaps not the easiest color to fit into an existing colorscheme though.. :P

For a captcha, maybe you could have Suzanne amongst a group of humans being put under the spotlight (or otherwise being 'singled out')

@gandalf3  How about a sad looking quadbot with some missing textures?  The quadbot is a fairly iconic Blender symbol with some more complexity (and thus easier to mess around with) than Suzanne.

@PGmath What's a quadbot..?

@gandalf3  Those things from Tears of Steel.  See my answer.

Looking at all the suggestions so far, my favorites are David's broken blender error, Dontwalk's "I am not a monkey" Suzanne captcha, and my (inspired by gandalf) pink Quadbot 404.

Any updates as to what is happening with this?

It's been a few months and nothing's been done, anything going on with this?

Captcha
For the Captcha page I envision a picture of Proog from elephants dream, redrawn in a style similar to world building's awesome new site design. Direct link to the poster.
Elephants dream was all inside a machine, captcha pages are meant to discern users from machines.

Error
A picture of a broken blender. The glass shattered and the blade bent. (not in a box or looking like this picture)

source
For anyone thinking that this joke is too overused, the error page is a perfect place to put it. This is the least viewed page of the three error pages; and a broken blender sure is an error.

404
perhaps a more stylized version of blender with nothing in it. (again going back to that poster) No text, no 3D view, just blender very lost. (and a real thing that happens).

Here are some good 404 pages from other network sites.
https://codereview.stackexchange.com/404
https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/404
https://travel.stackexchange.com/404
https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/404
https://workplace.stackexchange.com/404
and even
https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/404

I love the broken blender!

The broken blender error is great!  I don't really get the Captcha/Proog link though.  I also kind of like Gandalf3's 404 suggestion better.

I agree with @PGmath

Here are my concepts.  I decided to use the Quad Bot from Tears of Steel since I think it lends itself to manipulation and interpretation than Suzanne (and it works really well with the captcha).  Though it's not quite as obvious symbol of Blender as Suzanne, I personally at least see it used quite a bit in the Blender community and immediately recognize it as closely accosted with Blender.

404 not found:
Inspired by gandalf3's suggestion of using missing image textures.

Error:

I do like David's broken blender Idea a lot too.  If someone can pull off a good render of it I'd go for that just as well.

Captcha:

I accidentally rendered this one at low-res, low samples.  I'll fix that sometime.
The posing on this one could use a little work.
(I'm not too swift with armatures so if someone could give me a little guidance on how to move the feet on his rig that would be cool.)
I know the rendered Quad Bot doesn't technically fit with the minimalist flat look of the main site UI.  But I think it actually looks pretty good as long as the backdrop matches the site background color, it looks like he's sitting there on the page staring at you.
The Quad Bot is licensed (CC) Blender Foundation | mango.blender.org.

The continuity here is brilliant.

I kind of like the idea with the tiling, but it doesn't really fit with everything else. I do like the "I am not a monkey" though.

I was going to suggest having the monkey scratching his chin for a 404, something akin to the thinker. Alternatively the Blender logo with the dot in the middle missing.

Captcha:
The StackExchange network would like you to prove that you are not a robot. because reasons.
We'll let you continue if you can answer the following question correctly:

This site offers support for Blender. What kind of Blender?

A kitchen appliance designed to make delicious smoothies full of vitamin D3
I don't care, as long as it blends.
A program designed to let you create 3D models / animations

Error
Something happened. Give the site a few minutes to recover.
This is our fault not yours - try back later
404
The page you tried to connect to doesn't appear to exist any longer. If it was a question it may have been deleted by the person that posted it.

i'll add images later.

Just found this now. +1 for the captcha query :)

Cool concept. LOL :D

source: Stack Exchange

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

sort: votes


text:
Is this SE running communtiy promotion ads?
I recently made a new area51 proposal and i heard about some SEs running community promotion ads like:(see the links)
http://physics.stackexchange.com
http://earthscience.stackexchange.com

Update
As of September 10, 2015 we are starting the community ads.
Community Promotion Ads - 2015

Old answer for the beta site below.

TL;DR
Nope

Beta sites on the SE network do not get community ads, only full sites.

In response to the popularity of that program, we've extended this vote based advertising program to all the public Stack Exchange sites.

From Community Promotion Ads
When we graduate (we are in the process now) then we will get ads. (How often do you see people asking for ads?)

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/


text:
Is it appropriate to ask about project maintenance and architecture?
Executive Sumary
I'd like to find resources for learning how to maintain a small but non-trivial animation project, such as two or three minute animated film.  Would it be appropriate to open up a question on this?  Or would it be possible to add a "Project Architecture and Maintenance" section to the resources community wiki?  I'm asking on Meta because I realize this isn't a technical question about Blender, so I'm unsure of its appropriateness.
TL;DR
Once upon a time I began learning c++. For a popular language like this, the online resources for learning syntax, best practices, and basic design patterns are exhaustive.  However, I found it quite difficult to move from writing individual "toy" programs to large-scale, useful applications.  Most of what I've learned about the latter--which I eventually found out is called "software architecture"--I picked up from using, reading, and sometimes contributing to open source projects on GitHub.
Now I've been using Blender for a little while, and see myself running into a similar issue.  The online resources and user community for Blender are incredible.  But tutorials tend to be "single-serving" by their nature, focusing on a single object/scene/shot/technique.  What I'd like to understand is how to maintain a project in a way that supports modularity, and is scalable to a still small, but nontrivial project (say a short animated film of a few minutes, but involving multiple scenes and characters).  Are there resources (dedicated tutorials, or perhaps Blender projects on GitHub or elsewhere) where one could learn best practices for maintaining nontrivial projects?

In general we've avoided these sorts of questions, due to their broad scope and general nature (hard to provide a single definitive answer which applies to all projects). However, having a comprehensive reference for things like tried & tested organization techniques and common best-practices etc. would no doubt be extremely useful. Perhaps creating a canonical community wiki post is in order (we did something similar for GPU troubleshooting)

Something like that would be incredibly helpful, especially as asset managers/source control/integration with other apps evolve.  I'm happy to wait and gauge support, or I can go ahead and ask and just see how it is received.


text:
BSE python: to pep or not to pep. Standards vs Readability
The Blender Best Practices: Style Guide has a number of scripting recomendations, including the use of pep8.
Quoting PEP 8, beautiful code, and the tyranny of guidelines.

Getting PEP 8'ed
Once a standard exists, there’s a great temptation to impose that standard on other people’s code arbitrarily. You might even believe you’re doing the world a favor.
The PEP 8 standards warn against this with a quote from Ralph Waldo Emmerson: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”. But that doesn’t stop eager PEP 8ers diving in and complyifying other developers’ code. Once we know how to do something — and we believe it’s useful and productive — we’ll be tempted to jump in and do it wherever we can. Thus once somebody knows how, they can’t help but perpetrate PEP 8.
With any guideline: follow it yourself sooner than impose it on others.

Why?, later in the comments to this answer @David commented how readable the answer code is.  Agreed it is "cobolically" readable, BUT is a travesty against the pep8 rules... the thin edge of the wedge ...
Just this small snippet produces the following pep8 report.
for f in range(1,animLen + 1):
    S.frame_set( f ) # Set frame

    frmNum   = str( f ).zfill(3) # Formats 5 --> 005
    fileName = "angle_{a}_frm_{f}".format( a = angle, f = frmNum )
    fileName += S.render.file_extension
    bpy.context.scene.render.filepath = join( renderFolder, fileName )

# |2| 21: E201 whitespace after '('
# |2| 23: E202 whitespace before ')'
# |2| 25: E261 at least two spaces before inline comment
# |4| 15: E221 multiple spaces before operator
# |4| 24: E201 whitespace after '('
# |4| 26: E202 whitespace before ')'
# |4| 37: E261 at least two spaces before inline comment
# |5| 47: E201 whitespace after '('
# |5| 49: E251 unexpected spaces around keyword / parameter equals
# |5| 51: E251 unexpected spaces around keyword / parameter equals
# |5| 60: E251 unexpected spaces around keyword / parameter equals
# |5| 62: E251 unexpected spaces around keyword / parameter equals
# |5| 69: E202 whitespace before ')'
# |7| 50: E201 whitespace after '('
# |7| 73: E202 whitespace before ')'

The usage of dislike( this ) has started to proliferate.  How do others feel about this.  Should some form of coding standard (pep8, tlousky2017, lol) be adhered to on BSE, or is it open slather?

I think the effort required to globally enforce something like this will be much larger than any conceivable gain is worth:

Lots of existing code which likely doesn't follow spec
New users are arriving all the time; likely won't know (or care) about it
As you say, code snippets don't have to be standardized to be understood.
Being understood is the primary goal for most code snippets here; they usually are intended to demonstrate a concept rather than function as a complete implementation.

On the other hand, editing to improve clarity, readability, and accuracy is something which should always be advocated.   While enforcing an entire standard on a global level might not be very productive or practical, editing individual answers which you personally feel could be worded (or coded) in a clearer manner is absolutely something to encourage!

I personally dislike( this ) as well ;)
But then again, I'm also the kind of person who's too lazy to write spaces in their-css:rules;.

"With any guideline: follow it yourself sooner than impose it on others."  is probably the go I suppose.  I'm certainly too lazy to bother pepifying others' code snippets


text:
My question "The Blender add-on Render:POVray has a warning that 'this script is RC/... what does this mean?" was closed as off topic... Why?
I have admittedly revised the question, several times, in order to comply with the requirements of "non meta" blender stack-exchange.  At first I had a request for opinion, I removed.  Then I was accused of not trying to look up the information: I did; however I admit I was thinking Warning!  Not informational, which it turned out to be.  And yet, there is one particular individual who has insisted that this question is off topic and was able to raise support and get the question closed as off topic.  I accept that the question was asked and answered, for which I'm grateful; but, why the close because of off topic?
Link to question: Add-on has a warning that "this script is RC". What does this mean?
So, wanting to be a good participant in StackExchange, I have been trying to find out how this is off topic.  If such a simple and not so obvious answer to someone new is a forbidden question, what do the guidelines mean?
I read if you need a .blend file to answer the question, the question is off topic; But, I see people request blend files, and give them, even tutorials to answer questions all the time.
 (so far I don't have an issue with this, and a blanket statement that it's off topic, and should be somewhere else is understandable but....)
However confusing that is, this is about how the ruling on my question was decided, and why it is off topic, or possibly on topic; and the reference to the violations are about the "HELP" comment #9 Support Requests on this page: What questions should be definitely off-topic? are only used to give an example of how confusing this can be and how it is possible that people with a vendetta (unknown reasons on my part).  In my case, the answer is obvious once one knows the answer.  But, with is listed as a Warning, without knowing the answer, the answer is not so obvious.

The reason is that It's debatable whether or not "meaning of the term 'RC'" is a blender question. To be honest, we haven't had many questions like yours, so it's a bit unclear where it falls in terms of on-topicness..

I'm sorry you had so unpleasant an experience for your first question.
Part of the confusion stems from the fact that AFAIK we haven't really had many questions like yours, i.e. questions about terminology and acronyms appearing in blender, but not directly specifically about or related to blender.
On the one hand, the question is clearly about a blender addon, and there's nothing off-topic about that.
On the other hand, the answer is not specific to or especially related to blender at all.
So it seems to me a matter of whether or not the question is considered off-topic, or if the question's answers are considered off-topic.
This is a tricky question, as closing questions based on the answer doesn't seem at all fair to the asker, who obviously doesn't know what the answer is before asking. However, just allowing any question if the OP doesn't know the answer doesn't seem like a reasonable policy either ;)
In line with the philosophy of "tag the question not the answers"
I don't see much of an issue with allowing these in our scope:

The Blender Stack Exchange site is for people who use Blender to create 3D graphics, animations, or games.

But It'd be nice to hear what other users think too.

Regarding use of blends in answers, we've revisited this topic several times. It still seems like a rather fuzzy issue to me, but thats a whole other discussion ;)
Also see Regarding questions and answers as tutorials.

In a lot of cases we refer questions about specific add-ons to the website , repository, or thread / group set up by its creator(s). Who else better to answer a question by a user of one's add-on than them. Especially new add-ons should come with a reasonable amount of documentation and explanations for any language used on the User Interface. It's in the author's interest to handle questions that arise and update any docs.
Please don't see a question being closed (or attempted closed) as a  personal insult, or that we consider it useless. Sometimes you'll get a chain of votes by people who take a more literal approach to the question and see the Answer as being sufficiently detached from the Blender program to deem the Question that spawned it off topic. Often the votes will act as a speed dial to get you to take the critique on board and change the question to make it more general and useful to a broader public.
I agree with both sides here, the question was off topic to begin with, and a short answer in the comments would have sufficed. Even with the question closed it will now show up in the searches and have an answer.

OK, add ons aren't specifically 'about' Blender, I get that. I'm more interested in getting the powers that be to change the revision info, add "this code is RC to that!".  I can see that doing this not the big battle..  I just like to fix problems permanently, so no one else has it.  I'm satisfied now that a direct query on the questionable info gets an answer., Not a fix though. I'm trying to understand how best I can help, and learn something along the way. BTW, are you "the" Zeffii of RaQ fame I know from the past? Is the question off topic in Meta?  Thank you all, I have my answers.

In the past that addon used to say' warning this is a beta release', then it progressed onto 'warning this is a RC' . Ultimately it is up to the people involved with the addon (..not us, here) to change the text on their addon. In my response i've already suggested a way to contact them, it's out of our hands. Though I agree that 'RC' is a little vague for most people.  Nope I don't recall any affiliation with RaQ.

Again, I learned something I didn't know; it was intrinsically obvious to me that the developers are responsible for the behavior of the addon; I wasn't aware that once it had been accepted as an addon in Blender's release programs, the developer was responsible for the way it appears in Blender.  But, now, reflecting on this from a programming side, and being new to python, but not programming, I do now recall that the bl_info block in the code does list the information that shows up in Blender's addons. Thankfully, one is only a noob for a while, and many thanks to patient people like you!

Re: RaQ is was more a security program related to the Linux used in the RaQ. The Zeffii to which I refer was a superior programmer, as I recall. XD  It's just such an unusual name (to me) I'm surprised to find more than one. :-)

Unequivocally, I have reached consensus with the community.  The problem was more about the perspective of the OA (me) due to being new to stackexchange.  I framed a question which appeared completely on topic to me; but, in fact was completely related to the developers of the addon entirely.  Newcomer perspective is an ongoing issue and an old issue in Meta. Here, in Meta, the community attempts to resolve these issues. Newcomer's lack of perspective often present new, but non-unique classes of, problems, meta exists as venue for consensus, clarification and with hope, resolution.

To conclude, it is amazing how much text that short question has spawned in comments and answers. We could have mentioned that the warning is added by the author in the bl_info dict, that's definitely pure blender/addon development.

I have only recently become aware of that fact, and didn't know it at the time I posed the question.  The information would have pointed me to where the responsibility lay for the phrase, thus off topic in blender.stackexchange.  From a meta perspective, I think there exist exceptions to every rule, except the rule of exceptions.  So, questions about the use of add ons being acceptable seems ambiguous, how implemented in Blender, even more so. Is it intuitive to know how Blender implemented the add on? Invariably questions as exceptions will occur; a good moderator is the answer to exceptions.

In the scope of this question, what exactly does it mean to "close" a question.  What changes occur because a question is closed?  IOW my question has been closed, what does that mean?  What happens now? I did search for an answer to this in meta, and perhaps my phrasing or the search engine was weak, but I found nothing.

Marking a question as closed has the effect of showing that no other  interaction with that question is considered necessary. You now know what RC stands for and that it has no special meaning within Blender -- for that reason (you may, or may not agree... ) we pull the plug. I modified the one existing answer to give it at least a Blender context.

But we do see some merit in keeping it around so it wasn't Deleted. Closing questions is better for the Question/Answer ratio, when the question is tiptoeing on no-man's land. (We are now at 1.3 A per Q....SE network like to see 2.5A per Q)


text:
Should the RenderFarm chat room be promoted more prominently?
Should the RenderFarm chat room be promoted more prominently on https://blender.stackexchange.com/ so that more people will know it exists?
Currently, we have lots of notices about rooms not blender related, but none about the Renderfarm:

I only found out about Renderfarm by accident somehow.
If we want more participation, I think we need to promote it more prominently.

I don't think we need to promote the chat feature of the Blender Stack Exchange site for the following reasons:

I think it is safe to assume that most user come here to ask and answers questions, not to chat

The chat feature is not even that hard to find

An active user will discover this on their own

The chat is not the main goal of the site


text:
Tags - Singular or plural term?
Jonathan created a new tag tab (as in vertical tabs):
https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tab
Now I wonder if both, singular and plural forms are acceptable, or if either of them is prefered? Existing tags seem to use plural over singular. And I would actually like tabs more.
Or should it even be vertical-tabs, to explicitly refer to this new UI feature?

As a general rule of thumb, it's often best to go for the pluralized form when creating new tags.

Even though this is a new feature and it might help to filter these accordingly, I think this tag is too localized to one specific aspect of the UI, it's as useful as having a buttons and and menu tag.
I propose synonymizing it into interface.

Good point, I'd like to follow your suggestion and synonymize it - but... is it correct to suggest a synonym on [tag:tab], or do I suggest one for [tag:interface], in order to merge tab into interface?

@CoDEmanX The latter but no need to, I have already done so.


text:
Site review: how to vote if I find a different Blender.SE answer?
During the review, I was asked to give my opinion about this question.
Doing a Google search, I found a different question on third place, which I'd say provides at least an alternative to what the OP wants to do.
How to vote in this case?
The site does a great job, but the particular question doesn't. I voted for "Needs improvement", mainly because it

has an answer that is no better than what can be found elsewhere

Is my vote correct or should I have voted differently?

Your vote doesn't need to be correct, just honest.


text:
Is this off topic?
Declare a global variable in a Blender session
I'm still not quite sure what the scope of our site is. Would this be considered off-topic? It seems like it's mostly just Python. If not, why? I'm interested in understanding the principles/reasons so that I can apply them better.

Pure python questions are off-topic but as long as it is related to use in Blender in any way. It's fine.

In this case, the question is about Python scripts sharing data within Blender, how scripts interact within Blender is a little confusing to many new devs so, I think this is fine.

Have you taken a look here: What questions should be definitely off-topic??
We have a clear list of what is allowed and what is isn't. You can ask Python related questions here so long as they are about Blender + Python.

Ah, must have overlooked this one somehow.


text:
Can we add a "Low Quality" reason to the close vote?
Maybe it's just me, but I seem to be seeing a lot more very low-quality posts than before. Some, like this one, seem almost unsalvageable (especially pre-edit):  Object Merge ShortCut
EDIT: This is an even better example: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/53213/make-human-import-intro-blender-and-export-blend-animation-to-three-js
Even editing the question would have to involve a number of assumptions about what the OP is even trying to ask.
I don't want to discourage people from participating, but I DO want to discourage them from blurting out the first set of words that comes to mind and putting a question-mark at the end of it. There should be a good close reason for posts that just can't be improved by anyone but the OP.
But, there's no "Low Quality" close reason. I'm thinking of one like on SuperUser:

Very low quality
This question has severe formatting or content problems. This question is unlikely to be salvageable through editing, and might need to be removed.

Turns out... this is a "flag reason" that I somehow overlooked. Why would we have such a reason for a flag, but not close?

"blurting out the first set of words that comes to mind and putting a question-mark at the end of it." This actually describes remarkably well what a lot of questions appear like.

I suspect that the site has become large enough to be found by people with Blender questions (YAY!!) But that's attracting lots of askers who seem to be unfamiliar with SE, and most of them don't pick up on the clues that there's more research to be done about how to use this site, than there would be with any other new-found forum. (I can sympathize with the thought process that just doesn't notice how different SE is, and it just doesn't trigger that they need to figure out how to use it differently from any other forum on the web).

In the past we've used "unclear what your asking" for this. It seems pretty applicable to the two questions you linked, imo.

That's sounds more reasonable than adding a new reason. Care to make that an answer? ;-)

It seems to me that the existing "unclear what you're asking" close reason covers this pretty well already.
I also think it's less likely to come across as "your question is bad", something which "low quality" could quite easily do.


text:
Should each method be its own answer?
There are a good number of questions on this site that have answers which include multiple methods to solve the problem. Should these individual method be each in their own answer? The benefits of this system are:

When a new users comes along in the future and sees an answer with multiple method he might not know which one is better, why he should chose one over the other.
Individual method have their own votes, it becomes very clear which is best
More answers for the sake of having more answers

Here are some example questions:

How to align an object by one or two edges to xyz axes?
Abstract Wave with Particle System
How to stretch a mesh object over another?
Cleanly Combine Two Landscapes
How can I animate the camera in a perfect circular rotation around a fixed position?

Yes, each answer should contain one solution.  As a user, if I see several answers to a question I'm more inclined to think there's some interesting discussion going on that might be worth my time.  A question with a single right answer probably is very specific, and not generally applicable. A question with lots of answers will be more interesting.
It will also encourage better answers.  There's no reason for a single user to make more than one answer to a question, and if there's only one solution in that post they will choose what they feel is the best solution, rather than spewing off all possible solutions.

We could go through all posts looking for pages that meet the criteria of this topic and build each them into something that matches the expectations of people who search for this.
In essence, these pages could be the prototypes for tutorials and documentation that capture the the big picture by showing many uses from several different perspectives.  Often people find something useful that is unintended by the original software designers.  In this case the original tool turns out to have many more uses than originally expected because an artist made a mistake or was thinking outside the box.
To look at this another way, a page that fits this criteria would be complete and accurate supplementary material for the official docs on the BF site.
They could actually replace the official docs or be appended to them.
Out of all the conversations that I've had with BF devs and from all the times I've seen various BF devs interact with artists, I've gotten the impression that they are very moderate and reasonable people as a whole.  I think they would love it if this site became a refinement to the official documentation.  I'm sure if they felt otherwise they would never bother to show up here at all.

How to align an object by one or two edges to xyz axes?<-very ambiguous.  He uses several keywords that bridge many diverse topics.  He sounds like he is looking for a way to correct a key-stoke.  Or maybe he wants to adjust a keystroke with another and then he is asking about the physics engine.

To me, at first it seemed that he wants to constrain the transformation to one axis, well that's simple.
Then he mentions far-reaching possible solutions and now I would have no idea what to write.  He made a mistake that caused confusion. This happens to everyone from time to time but can muddy the discussion.
The info on that page is valuable but needs to be made coherent.    This page could instead be replaced with a new page that fits the specifications for official BF docs which can now have an editing and rating system that is primarily based of the opinions of the BF Dev team.

Sometimes questions have answers that include dealing with aspects that the OP might not be aware of. In an attempt to be thorough why limit yourself to giving just one solution -- if someone has time to answer, let them do so in several ways. It will benefit someone somewhere down the line.
Precise questions tend to get few solutions, maybe because the OP restricts the elements that play in the scenario.

Individual method have their own votes, it becomes very clear which is best

"best" may be subjective


text:
Button to insert  for users
I come across a lot of posts which lack proper hotkey formatting: any key
And I change it to: AnyKey
It would save me 11 keystrokes per  if there was a button in the post editor toolbar.
Is there a way to add it? Or is it solely managed by SE?
UX has a unique wireframe-editor button, so there seem to be differences...

Any reason to not have this for users without moderator rights too?

I worry it could be abused by new users to highlight anything but shortcuts.

We already have that issue to some extent with the existing formatting options (mainly with backtics). We'll just have to edit these when needed. Users that stay around will eventually catch on (if not, we can just leave a comment pointing the the style guide meta).

I have made a variant of the script posted by CoDEmanX with:

Multi-char support
A keyboard shortcut (CtrlY, if you think of a better available key, please comment)
Optional key/mousebutton icons
Support for reviewing/improving edits, answering own questions, etc.
Undo support
An icon
Automatic extra space removal

Example of usage:

Tested on Firefox 59.0.2 and Chromium 65.0.3325.181.
Recommended to install with Tampermonkey for chrome users.
Greasyfork
Gist

Please forgive my less-than-polished js skills..

Nice additions gandalf! The problem with Chrome might be the sandboxing, since we inject the user script from another source (file:/// or localhost respectively)... The shortcut is not going to work for edits, 'cause it uses an ID: $("#wmd-input").keydown(...). You might want to bind it to the class .wmd-input instead. There's a } too much at the end it seems.

Hm ok, that } is needed, the Firefox code highlighter just can't find the matching one of main() {? Very strange. The button works like a charm, but the shortcut doesn't. Ctrl+E places the cursor in the quick search field in Firefox, Y does nothing and Z is for undo (Z and Y are swapped on German keyboards, so I checked that too...). There's a feature missing from my script: the cursor placing after button use. With no text selected, it should insert a kbd-tag and place cursor inbetween, otherwise add tags and place cursor behind the last. Also focus() the textarea in both cases.

Ok, I fixed some problems and optimized the embedded icon, works for me in Firefox. Hotkey is a bit problematic it seems, doesn't work in some cases. Back-ported my cursor placement. http://userscripts.org/scripts/review/486617

Mystery solved: the deprecated .live() worked for the hotkey, but .on() didn't - 'cause it needs to be used on document and the elements we are interested in are given as second parameter as filter! Works like charm!

Brilliant :) I didn't do anything, but the hotkey didn't give me any trouble.. On my FF Ctrl E does nothing, however chrome puts it in the url bar, so I guess that's a no go either way. It would be nice to have a key a bit closer to left Ctrl, but it doesn't look like there is one free. Is it worth breaking the theme of using Ctrl to use Alt+nearby-sensible-letter or something instead?

I added extra space removal, so now extra spaces are removed automatically. I also scaled down the icon to 20px so it fits better, but as a result un-optimized it again :/ (idk how to optimize it). I tried to get the button li to go after the image  button (it seems like the right category to me) by replacing appendTo with insertAfter("#wmd-image-button"), but it still goes at the end??

Wow, this is really nice. Great job guys. Can we agree on one final version. @gandalf3 Would recommend uploading to userscripts.org so it can be 1 click installation.

@iKlsR Okay. Still not quite done yet, still some kinks imo (plus it's currently not working on chrome, looking at that now). Working again, jquery was used before it was loaded..

Really didn't see the need for a dependency tho.

For me, Ctrl+Y is fine, 'cause it's the closest key to Left Ctrl on my German keyboard ;) Ctrl+E is used by both browsers, so better not overwrite default behavior. You can optimize PNGs using https://tinypng.com/, which uses http://pngquant.org/. insertAfter doesn't work, 'cause every button has an offset (left: 25px * n, where n is the index). To insert another button, you would have to get the previous offset and add 25px to your and all subsequent buttons. @iKlsR: It did not work on Chrome apparantly, might be caused by its sandboxing / same-origin-policy. It does in Firefox however.

I made an adaptation of it for Blender Community, just the keyboard shortcut part.

Latest versions of BSE require only HTTPS picture links instead of HTTP, could you update please? :)

Thanks iKlsR, I created a Greasemonkey script based on your code, which inserts a new button automatically:
// ==UserScript==
// @name        Add  Button to StackExchange Toolbar
// @namespace   http://blender.org
// @include     *.stackexchange.com/*
// @version     1
// @grant       none
// ==/UserScript==

var toolbar;
function toolbar_wait() {
    toolbar = document.getElementById('wmd-button-row');
    if (toolbar == null) {
        window.setTimeout(toolbar_wait, 500);
    } else {
        toolbar_add();
    }
}
toolbar_wait();

function insert_kbd()
{
    var txta = document.getElementById('wmd-input');
    if (txta.selectionStart == null) return;
    var chars = txta.value.split("");
    chars.splice(txta.selectionStart, 0, '');
    chars.splice(txta.selectionEnd + 1, 0, '');
    txta.value = chars.join("");
    toolbar_update();
}

function toolbar_add() {

    var style = document.createElement('style');
    style.setAttribute('type', 'text/css');
    style.innerHTML = '#wmd-kbd-button:hover {background-color: #deedff;}';
    document.body.appendChild(style);

    var li = document.createElement('li');
    li.onclick = insert_kbd;
    li.setAttribute('style', 'font-size: 9pt; left: 400px;');
    li.setAttribute('title', 'Keyboard Shortcut ')
    li.setAttribute('id', 'wmd-kbd-button')
    toolbar.appendChild(li);
    li.className = 'wmd-button';

    var span = document.createElement('span');
    span.innerHTML = 'kbd';
    span.setAttribute('style', 'background-image:none;');
    li.appendChild(span);
}

function toolbar_update() {

    var element = document.getElementById('wmd-input');

    var keyboardEvent = document.createEvent("KeyboardEvent");
    var initMethod = typeof keyboardEvent.initKeyboardEvent !== 'undefined' ? "initKeyboardEvent" : "initKeyEvent";

    keyboardEvent[initMethod](
                   "keydown", // event type : keydown, keyup, keypress
                    true, // bubbles
                    true, // cancelable
                    window, // viewArg: should be window
                    false, // ctrlKeyArg
                    false, // altKeyArg
                    false, // shiftKeyArg
                    false, // metaKeyArg
                    17, // keyCodeArg : unsigned long the virtual key code, else 0
                    0 // charCodeArgs : unsigned long the Unicode character associated with the depressed key, else 0
    );
    element.dispatchEvent(keyboardEvent);

}

Install: https://userscripts-mirror.org/scripts/show/486617
I added a hack to simulate a keydown event (ctrl) to make the live markdown preview update. Tested and working in Firefox 28.

Installed via Tampermonkey and working on latest version of chrome as well. Really nice. Thanks. I couldn't figure how to get the live update so I just opted to have it trigger with other user input after. ;)

I initially had it binded to wmd-input too but changed it as I thought since I was using a bookmarklet it could be useful elsewhere as well.

 isn't supported in comment anyway, I use backticks instead. Thanks for testing! Now, should I accept my own answer or yours?

Tested on Chrome OS X & it works GREAT if I'm creating an answer, but the kbd button is not there if I try to edit an existing answer.

@CoDEmanX Yours will do. I mean't elsewhere, not comments, we all use backticks ;). I need some sleep.

Alright! I updated the script to use jQuery and made it work that it also injects the button if you edit posts. Hope it still works for everyone. I couldn't find a jQuery-way of updating the markdown preview, so left that untouched for now and created a question on SO: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23460904/jquery-replacement-for-dispatchevent-keydown-how-to-get-trigger-working

Such a feature is not available in the formatting toolbar, you have to do it manually. I've often wanted the same feature as it is encouraged that posts be formatted correctly, especially input.
My javascript is really, really rusty but I managed to throw something together that should save a bit of time (a few seconds at least ;) when doing this.
Install

Drag this line of code to your bookmarks bar, raw. (only tested on chrome and firefox).
javascript:(function(){var txta = document.activeElement; if (txta.selectionStart == undefined) return; var chars = txta.value.split(""); chars.splice(txta.selectionStart, 0, ''); chars.splice(txta.selectionEnd + 1, 0, ''); txta.value = chars.join("");})()

You can then rename the newly created bookmark to something useful.

Usage
Select the text to be wrapped in the textarea and click the bookmark.

Someone who has a few minutes to spare could convert this into a userscript and have it fit nicely in the formatting toolbar methinks.

Never made user scripts before, but I'll give it a go :)

Super awesome! One question: on my OS X with Chrome, for some reason the formatting does not display in the formatting preview until I press some other key in the editing window. I'm not complaining, just wondering if this is a known issue?

Can we have a favicon for it too?

@ThomBlairIII Not really an issue per se, the input field needs some sort of trigger to update the kbd preview. CoDEmanX's script below has a little hack for getting around this and is much better.

Autohotkey
Since I'm using Autohotkey, I wrote myself a script. Still not tested thoroughly... I'm just using the Unicode symbols, rather than specifying them by Unicode codepoints, so you need to save the script as UTF-8 with BOM, and use Authotokey version supporting UTF-8. As AHK works only on Windows, I didn't include any Mac specific keys. Also I chose glyphs by prioritizing readability rather than being rigorous on their meaning...
There are 3 complex glyphs for Lock keys produced with MathJax - not sure if everyone will see them properly:
$\fbox{A}$ CAPS LOCK $\fbox{1}$ Num Lock $\rlap{\fbox{ ⬇ }} \_\;$ Scroll Lock
Desired result:

Also I don't put mouse hints inside , as those aren't keys, but that might be pedantic reasoning; and I don't use images because it would be harder to do and I have mixed feelings about embedding images so aggressively. The script will also add a 3-word description to a mouse indicator:

lmb;; $\color{green}{█}\color{#888}{0█}$ left mouse button
mmb;; $\color{#888}{█}\color{green}0\color{#888}{█}$ middle mouse button
mwu;; $\color{#888}{█}\color{green}⬆\color{#888}{█}$ mouse wheel up
mwd;; $\color{#888}{█}\color{green}⬇\color{#888}{█}$ mouse wheel down
rmb;; $\color{#888}{█0}\color{green}{█}$ right mouse button

Usage:

for mouse indicators type the strings visible above
for keys that produce a visible glyph, type kb then the key (with no modifiers), then two semicolons ;; e.g. kb;;; for ; or kbe;; for E
for numpad keys type numpad, then as above, e.g. numpad4;; for Numpad 4
kbf1;; to kbf12;; for F1 to F12 keys
the rest of special keys by name without kb prefix:

ctrl;;✲ Ctrl
;
alt;;⎇ Alt
;
shift;;⬆ Shift
;
win;;❖ Win
;
menu;;☰ Menu
;
enter;;↩ Enter
;
numpadenter;;Numpad Enter
;
tab;;⭾ Tab
;
del;;⌦ Del
;
ins;;⎀ Ins
;
home;;|⬅ Home
;
end;;➡| End
;
backsp;;⟵ Backspace
;
space;;␣ Spacebar
;
pgup;;⬆ Page Up
;
pgdn;;⬇ Page Down
;
prtscr;;⎙ Prt Scr
;
capslock;;$\fbox{A}$ CAPS LOCK
;
scrolllock;;$\rlap{\fbox{ ⬇ }} \_\;$ Scroll Lock
;
numlock;;$\fbox{1}$ Num Lock
;
up;;⬆ Up
;
left;;⬅ Left
;
right;;➡ Right
;
down;;⬇ Down
AHK script
Consider adding #if WinActive("ahk_class MozillaWindowClass ahk_exe firefox.exe") as first line so it works only in Firefox.
#Hotstring EndChars . `n `t
#Hotstring NoMouse
#Hotstring c r *
; c - case sensitive
; r - send raw
; * - ending character not required

::lmb;;::$\color{green}{█}\color{#888}{0█}$ *left mouse button*
::mmb;;::$\color{#888}{█}\color{green}0\color{#888}{█}$ *middle mouse button*
::mwu;;::$\color{#888}{█}\color{green}⬆\color{#888}{█}$ *mouse wheel up*
::mwd;;::$\color{#888}{█}\color{green}⬇\color{#888}{█}$ *mouse wheel down*
::rmb;;::$\color{#888}{█0}\color{green}{█}$ *right mouse button*

::ctrl;;::✲ Ctrl
::alt;;::⎇ Alt
::shift;;::⬆ Shift
::win;;::❖ Win
::menu;;::☰ Menu
::enter;;::↩ Enter
::tab;;::⭾ Tab
::del;;::⌦ Del
::ins;;::⎀ Ins
::home;;::|⬅ Home
::end;;::➡| End
::backsp;;::⟵ Backspace
::space;;::␣ Spacebar
::pgup;;::⬆ Page Up
::pgdn;;::⬇ Page Down
::prtscr;;::⎙ Prt Scr
::capslock;;::$\fbox{A}$ CAPS LOCK
::scrolllock;;::$\rlap{\fbox{ ⬇ }} \_\;$ Scroll Lock ; $\fbox{↕}$ Scroll Lock
::numlock;;::$\fbox{1}$ Num Lock

::numpad0;;::Numpad 0
::numpad1;;::Numpad 1
::numpad2;;::Numpad 2
::numpad3;;::Numpad 3
::numpad4;;::Numpad 4
::numpad5;;::Numpad 5
::numpad6;;::Numpad 6
::numpad7;;::Numpad 7
::numpad8;;::Numpad 8
::numpad9;;::Numpad 9
::numpad/;;::Numpad /
::numpad*;;::Numpad *
::numpad-;;::Numpad -
::numpad+;;::Numpad +
::numpadenter;;::Numpad Enter
::numpad.;;::Numpad .

::up;;::⬆ Up
::left;;::⬅ Left
::right;;::➡ Right
::down;;::⬇ Down

::kbf1;;::F1
::kbf2;;::F2
::kbf3;;::F3
::kbf4;;::F4
::kbf5;;::F5
::kbf6;;::F6
::kbf7;;::F7
::kbf8;;::F8
::kbf9;;::F9
::kbf10;;::F10
::kbf11;;::F11
::kbf12;;::F12
::kb``;;::`
::kb1;;::1
::kb2;;::2
::kb3;;::3
::kb4;;::4
::kb5;;::5
::kb6;;::6
::kb7;;::7
::kb8;;::8
::kb9;;::9
::kb0;;::0
::kb-;;::-
::kb=;;::=
::kb[;;::[
::kb];;::]
::kb;;;::;
::kb';;::'
::kb\;;::\
::kb,;;::,
::kb.;;::.
::kb/;;::/

::kbq;;::Q
::kbw;;::W
::kbe;;::E
::kbr;;::R
::kbt;;::T
::kby;;::Y
::kbu;;::U
::kbi;;::``I``
::kbo;;::O
::kbp;;::P
::kba;;::A
::kbs;;::S
::kbd;;::D
::kbf;;::F
::kbg;;::G
::kbh;;::H
::kbj;;::J
::kbk;;::K
::kbl;;::L
::kbz;;::Z
::kbx;;::X
::kbc;;::C
::kbv;;::V
::kbb;;::B
::kbn;;::N
::kbm;;::M

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
Search in favor of tags?
I retagged a question to make it easier to find, but turned out, tags show in the result set but aren't more important than the text (free text search in question title, body, answers...).
Went to the Help Center and found out that one can search in certain tags only using:
[python] [curves] [import]
https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/python+curves+import
This is the result I wanted, but it's awkward to type and no regular user will know the [tag] syntax.
Is there any trick, like a hidden search form to search in favor of tags somewhere? Or a way to select multiple tags and get all matching answers which contain at least these tags? (Tags page shows related tags only, and one can't remove tags once combined)

I would think that this is the feature. I would also say that you and I are average users, if one wants to utilize the site efficiently, poke around the help pages for a few minutes.

Yeah I guess, but I wonder why there is no neat interactive way to create these queries without brackets (or even keyboard)... Anyway, probably more appropriate to report this as feature request to the SE staff. Thanks iKlsR!

When you are on any tag page (example modeling) you will see that the search box has already been populated with the correct syntax to search in just that tag.
This makes it much easier for a "regular user" to learn about the powers of the search box.
PS if you are on the search page and you click the "Advanced Search Tips" you will see many of the most common features, but for a full list refer to this page.


text:
Is it ok to ask "cycles render versus blender render" questions?
I was thinking along the lines of bullet points comparing the two. (I'm asking for myself as I don't get the full implications).
Or would this just be too broad?
I found the answer to the 'proposed' FAQ quite useful: Frequently Asked Questions on Blender Stack Exchange
Seems like it would be a good place for such.

See http://blender.stackexchange.com/q/5820/599

Yes you can ask that type of question, its not off topic, but I expect it will get closed as a duplicate of one of the following.
Cycles vs Internal for a small animated outdoor scene?
How is Cycles different from Blender Internal?
Cycles vs internal vs game engine
Do note though, that this type of question if not worded very well, has a tendency to get closed as "primarily opinion-based."
If you already read through those, and still have a question about something specific (bullet points may get it closed as "Too Broad") then absolutely ask away.

@gandalf3 & David - wow, I did search for several variations and didn't find any of those. OK, good, don't want to dup.  Might add your lists of links to the 'FAQ' answer my OP mentions.  Hmmm... obviously, the key to triggering relevant 'related questions' while writing new question's subject line is nailing the right word or two for the search to get specific. Not always so obvious is Blender's jargon, requiring a certain amount of knowledge beforehand. I'd not have guessed "Internal" was the keyword ... I know thanks are frowned on, but, well, you know:_____! :))

Done: added "Differences between Renderers: Cycles, Blender Internal, and Game Engine" in http://meta.blender.stackexchange.com/a/1068/1332