The Odin Re-design is here
The Odin Project has been re-imagined! The old design had served The Odin Project well for many years but it was showing its age and we knew we could do better, so we’ve released a completely redesigned Odin website today!
Our goal with the re-design is to create an experience that captivates users with a unique pleasing design, that’s simple to use and will serve students for many years to come.
The user feedback we have received so far has been overwhelmingly positive so I think we just might have achieved that objective. Let’s take a look around the new site:
New Branding
The very first thing we looked at was the branding on Odin. We wanted a clean and memorable logo that pays homage to Norse mythology.
The Homepage
Of course with a shiny new logo, we had to update the rest of the site. The Odin Project homepage has been redesigned to showcase the new stylistic elements that you will see throughout the site.
The Dashboard
The dashboard is a new feature that wasn’t on the old site. Logged in students are automatically redirected here. It is the central hub where they can easily resume the last lesson they were working on and where they can keep an eye on their progress throughout the curriculum.
The Curriculum Page
The curriculum page has been simplified with a clean and simple design that provides students with all the information they need about the different courses.
The Course Pages
The individual course pages continue the minimal design. The different sections of a course are contained within cards to make it easier for students to see how each course is broken down.
The Lesson Pages
The lesson pages are the most important part of the site! We’ve improved the typography to make lessons easier and more pleasurable to read. We have also introduced a redeveloped component at the bottom of the page that allows students to easily mark a lesson complete and go to the next one.
The People that Made this Possible
Odin is an open source project, and everyone who helps maintain and improve it is a volunteer. Many contributors, both within the maintainer team and outside of it, selflessly dedicated their time to make this redesign possible.
Ada Chiu our Designer and the MVP
Ada is a UX and design expert who resides in Canada. She had previously redesigned another open source project, Code Buddies, to great success. She deserves the most credit and recognition for the redesign.
Every page on the site was meticulously designed by Ada. She was there every step of the way during development, vigilantly reviewing work done to ensure it met her high standards and as a result the finished site is extremely polished.
The Developers
Dozens of other people helped develop the re-designed site both in big and small ways. We even had a couple of contributors make their first pull request to an open source project during the redesign, which is always an amazing thing to facilitate!
There are far too many contributors to name them all, so I will only name drop the contributors who were key to making the redesign the success it is.
These people are: Arun Kumar, Cody Loyd, Rhys, Andy Duss, Austin Mason, David Chapman, Leo Soaivan, Rob Pando, Chad Kreutzer, Ryan, ayushkamadji, arcanck, Karen Freeman Smith, Ryan Workman, William Wanyama
Lastly, I want to give a shout out to Erik Trautman, the founder of The Odin Project, for the support he gave us throughout the redesign despite being super busy running the Viking Code School.
Whats Next for The Odin Project?
With the completion of the redesign, we finally have an awesome platform we can build upon to make a more engaging and useful site for our students.
We have many ideas for features that we want to develop over the next year or two. Such as gamification, making contributing new material to the curriculum easier, even more awesome tools to help the student with their learning and much, much more!
Our next big goal is to redevelop The Odin Project’s curriculum. We will be redeveloping pretty much all the courses on Odin, refreshing some lessons, removing others, and adding exciting new lessons as well!
If you would like to help us with this huge undertaking you can start right now by helping us develop a new Javascript curriculum. Please reach out to Cody Loyd, the lead maintainer of the Javascript course though the issues on our Javascript curriculum repo.
As we begin working on other courses, I will make posts outlining what we plan on doing.
Thank you again to everyone who has helped make The Odin Project what it is. Both the contributors and the students.
