In the midst of a secret meeting in the secretly secret underground lair of secret coders that code secret things in secret, Cecil and DavidJCobb realized that there was a critical flaw in their secretly-planned secret plan of secrets.

The two had been working on staging a massive coup, a takeover of an unsuspecting mapping community: StarEdit.Net. They would commandeer the website, snatching its reigns from its oblivious and infinitely less handsome overlords and usurping power. Cecil and Cobb were plotting a revolution, one in which they would utterly destroy SEN, so that they could rebuild it into a stronger, more durable machine. They would take the crumbling, creaking, crackling, cobweb-covered mansion that was SEN, and they would demolish it, establishing in its place a massive and triumphant skyscrapper -- an expertly-designed, well-crafted monolith whose glorious glory would better fit the reputation that SEN has. (No, not that reputation. The other one, from a while back.)

The dastardly coders' machinations had been machinating for some time. They were ready to initiate their reign of utter terror. They were ready to take SEN and rip it apart, spilling tags and discarded metadata all over the cobblestone floor. But there was only one problem.

They were coders. And coders, though omnipotent, are decidedly omnonpotent at visual design. They couldn't come up with a layout. Despite the duo's plan being absolutely perfect and without flaws, it had one fatal flaw.

And so the search began for a visual designer capable of visually designing the visual face of the new SEN -- a SEN of glory, awesomeness, more glory, and a dash of salt. They called upon everyone they knew! "Use Photoshop! Use GIMP! Use MSPaint if you have to! But we need layouts!" And now they lie in wait. They wait for a response from a paragon of visual design -- from a uber-talented ubermensch with uber-skills -- from a visual designer.

SEN is about to get a major overhaul, and we need people to design some new site layouts and skins. Will you answer the call?

I'll give a skin a go, but what css files do I edit and what am I constrained by? What are the limits and the minimum requirements?

Just use photoshop. There will be really not many constraints, and don't make skins based off of the skins for this version of SEN. Just use images.

I'll handle code as best as I can. It's concepts that are the hard part.

Pretend that SEN doesn't have a forum at all, that we're making a new one, and that we need a design for it.

When Cecil gets a basic framework -- DB, etc. -- in place I can start working on that and others.

As a side note: it may be wise to prepare any components or assets of a skin as separate units. (Using your case to provide an example: my job'll be easier if I can get the planet background as its own independent image.) People wishing to contribute don't have to do this now, but it'll probably become necessary down the road.

(So basically, don't merge everything into a single layer and then delete the source file. )

Does that mean the whole forum will be recoded from scratch?

Yep!

Here is what I have so far:


I'm guessing this may be a too drastic change...

The fonts for the text may not be the best choose and they would probably appear smaller if it was done for real.

There is a lot of things that are missing in that picture (Not yet made.).

You should make the bar something like blue or purple instead of red. Doesn't really fit the starcraft theme.

Try and see what you can do to... high-tech it. SEN looks dated (as do most forum systems); a function similar to FB's notifications could be implemented, and SEN needs to use more AJAX to get things done.

And don't screw it up along the way, please. <_<.

I've already been talking with David about using AJAX, he'd be the one doing the server-side code, so from my end it should be as easy as sending data to the page templates, where he uses the sent data to render whatever necessary. Keep the ideas coming you all. Be sure to check out some modern sites for layout ideas, I personally really like: http://sc2.nibbits.com/

Add any of those retarded "share on facefuck/twatter/whatever" links and I'll eat your babies.

Like this tux?

"CecilSunkure -- If you have input please put it in the topic... "

FIEN.

About what Apos posted so far:



Jack pointed out that it would actually be a nice "SafeForWork" skin, and something like that would actually be welcome. Why don't you work on making a skin of SEN for that purpose? What you have so far is closer to that than it is to an actual SEN look that we would want to adapt as the default appearance in the future.

Because I'm remaking SEN entirely, and thus we can't make new skins yet, and the method of making new skins in the future will be very different from now. This is why I asked everyone to just use photoshop instead of creating actuals skins for current SEN.

?

MZ that's pretty neat.

Yeah, not gonna lie... that's kinda sexy. Although, I'm not sure it really looks like a gaming site. The toolbar looks nice, but it doesn't look starcraft-y.

Will the new system allow some sort of lite or mobile skin? Viewing SEN on a mobile device (or my DS, which is text-and-inline-images-only) currently is just awful.