Keep in mind that I have tried to propose a design that solves some problems whilst making minimal or no changes to the content of the site. This is to ensure that the proposal is practically and politically implementable. The site could definately use some changes to it's information architecture and a serious amount of editing but that is beyond the initial scope.
This is a tricky issue since it's fairly subjective there are however ways of judging the size. First of all you can compare it to other sites, as this will give an initial idea New York Times, Apple, Microsoft this is conciously a list high profile brands which really push their brand and most of the time has no qualms about causing inconvenience to users.
The other thing you can do is ask yourself is the logo hard to find, does it have a prominent position? Does it serve it's purpose of marking the page and providing a link to the homepage? I think the proposed design anwers all these questions in the correct way and is actually louder that any of the examples above. If the logo is to large and prominent it will draw the eye towards it like a magnet shouting louder that the content you are trying to access. A good page will feel relaxed without undue emphasis on any part.
Someone kindly emailed me and told me that the website should repect the browser font size setting. I agreed and left the font size at the default 16px. It's slightly large for most people but it's the right thing to do.
See swirl. The difficulty is creating a website where all elements are given the correct emphasis, this helps usability. If one starts to up the volume of certain element you end up with a kind of arms race with escalating loudnesss resulting in junk mail aesthetics and readability. The most difficult thing is to establish how important each item is in relation to the others, after this is clear emphasis can be added.
One of the ways the debian logo is made prominent is by placing it on a column of whitespace. The spray like shape of the logo works really well as the top of a tall element. The text in the logo also becomes the home button in the line of breadcrumbs. These things are not critical to the design but a bunch of issues are solved by this precise solution, to change it a good argument will have to be put forward.
This was certainly the case so I have changed a few things, see below
The poposed page is less that a third of the existing one.
Kaa, the snake from The Jungle Book ordered me to do it. And I ha havee to obeeyy. Seriously, a lively, open and free graphic gives a bit of energy to the homepage. The design is otherwiser very sober and a bit of contrast is quite good, the place for bling is the homepage. In addition I expect the homepage graphics to change according to recent or upcoming events, the mega swirls are just a placeholder suggesting a visual style, if my proposal goes live the graphic should announce this.
This is a difficult one and I have to do some tests. The criticism so far has been.
Possible solutions are