About this redesign

This is an unsolicited redesign of tug.org, the real website of the TeX Users Group, built for a COMP4020 studio crit. TUG didn't ask for this and isn't using it; it's a real organisation, but the exercise is mine.

Why TUG

TUG is the nonprofit that keeps TeX and LaTeX — the typesetting system behind most well-set academic papers, theses, and books — free, portable, and maintained, mostly on the strength of member dues. It funds work that has no other funding source: the software archive (CTAN), the TeX Live distribution, the TUGboat journal, an annual conference. That's worth liking. Its website is not.

What tug.org gets wrong

The homepage puts the year's news, a PayPal donate button, a subscription pitch, and the group's founding history all in one undifferentiated column of text, in the order they happened to be added rather than the order a first-time visitor needs them. Headings are set with a <font color> tag rather than real markup. Contact details, membership tiers, and the journal archive each live on separate pages with no consistent way in from the front door. Nothing on it is broken, exactly — but "who are you, what do you do, and how do I join" takes several minutes of reading to answer, for an organisation whose entire reason for existing is typesetting done well.

The argument this version makes

A site run by the people who care most about good typesetting should itself be legible: one question answered per page (who they are, what TeX is, how to join, where the journal and software live), a measure you can read a paragraph across without losing your place, and a heading hierarchy a screen reader can actually use. Nothing here is clever; the redesign's whole claim is that clarity was already available and TUG's own site wasn't using it.

Design notes

Set in a system serif stack (Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, then whatever serif the browser has) on an off-white paper tone, with classic unvisited/visited link blue as the only saturated colour — except one. TUG's own homepage sets its news heading in dark red; this version keeps a single red, used only for the small kicker line atop each page and the current page's underline in the nav. Restrained to one mark like that, it reads the way a seal stamp does on an ink-wash scroll: a single deliberate colour against an otherwise monochrome page, not a palette.

Every page's prose is rewritten from TUG's real pages — the homepage, whatis.html, aims_ben.html, join.html, TUGboat/, texlive/, meetings/, and contact.html — not copied from them; facts (the founding year, Knuth's revision of The Art of Computer Programming, the three membership aims, the postal address) are checked against those pages rather than against memory. The join page restructures TUG's own membership information but still sends anyone ready to sign up to tug.org's real form, since this exercise has no backend or payment processor of its own.