Quote from DevliN

"Contest Forums" would be best, imo.

It'd get repetitive though. "CONTESTS FORUM" "SC2 MAPPING FORUM" "SC2 MELEE FORUM" "BW MAPPING FORUM" "TERRAIN FORUM" And if you only put "FORUM" for some of the forums, then it looks non-consistent. /ocd

Quote from Dem0nS1ayer

Quote from DevliN

"Contest Forums" would be best, imo.

It'd get repetitive though. "CONTESTS FORUM" "SC2 MAPPING FORUM" "SC2 MELEE FORUM" "BW MAPPING FORUM" "TERRAIN FORUM" And if you only put "FORUM" for some of the forums, then it looks non-consistent. /ocd

The same could be said for putting "SC2" and "SC1" in front of everything. I think it's worth it to sacrifice succinctness for clarity.

Besides, "Forum" would only be used by the subforum dividers. It wouldn't say "SC1 TERRAIN FORUM," but rather "SC1 TERRAIN" would be under the "SC1 FORUM" divider. I think this is perfectly reasonable. Although I do agree that appending "Forum" to a subsection of a forum listing is not really necessary.

I'm less worried about the semantics of the thing and more worried about whether there's enough interest for it to become an actual, functional skin. As some of you may recall, I had made a skin a while ago -- in fact, it even went so far as to be mostly coded. But it's still not implemented. I'll find the link later, but point is: unless there's an outpouring of interest, there's very little likelihood that any designs will make it into their final stages. For now -- apparently SENv6 will make skin coding a breeze.

I tried to implement it, and then got caught up with work.

Here's a layout I threw together for a SENv6 skin:




Some general notes on what I had in mind:

• The background image would be static.
  
• On the Portal page, even though the News thing seems redundant, I like the idea of a smaller quicker way of seeing things as well as being able to scroll through it.
  
• The "Events" thing is just a simple idea to perhaps make organizing those events easier, allowing members to sign up in advance and discuss them there.
  
• The links on the navbar would be different ultimately, as I think Site needs to be split up better.
  
• I've tried the Post page layout without the white backgrounds behind posts, with a whole white background behind all the posts at once, and then the way it looks now. This looked the best of the three.
  
• Despite what it may seem like, most of that would just be using CSS3, so it isn't very graphics intensive.

I think for the last picture, the thread view, it would be better if it was one continuous/large white box, and the posts were individual green boxes. Having individual green boxes on top of individual white boxes seems funny and redundant. Removing the white boundaries could squeak out roughly 10 pixels of extra space too. Sure, you would no longer see the background between posts, but it looks odd at the moment. Also the current side margins of the white box are too big, they'd look better if you used the same width (height?) that the top/bottom margins do now.

Yeah, like I said I tried it with all white and it looked really strange. I'm not a fan of the white part, either, so I plan on redoing the Post view. Without the white there, I basically have gray on gray (think the posts without the white on the gray background from the Forum view). I don't want the actual post backgrounds to be green, though, so I've just gotta do some tweaking there. I'll most likely remove all the white (aside from the thread title BG) and frame the gray of the posts better. I've spent the least amount of time on that one of the three.

EDIT:

Quote from Lanthanide

Removing the white boundaries could squeak out roughly 10 pixels of extra space too.

It would, though as a whole it would still be the same width since the white parts are the same size as the green thread title background.

Haha oh god some of the things you put on that are hilarious. I especially like the Haddaway reference.

It does look nice, but I think the white is a bit too plain, especially on the top where all the navigation buttons are.

So I heard Devlin can both create epic skins and travel in time?

Good job on that. As yourself and others have said, that white thingy has to be changed. Have you tried setting it to a more "grey" color?

Quote from TiKels

Haha oh god some of the things you put on that are hilarious. I especially like the Haddaway reference.

Thanks, yeah. At first I was going to make it all ridiculous, but for the post view thing I decided to keeps it real.

Quote from Dem0nS1ayer

It does look nice, but I think the white is a bit too plain, especially on the top where all the navigation buttons are.

I disagree. I think the navbar looks fine, other than the names of the links that would be on there. There's a feint gradient on it, that I can make stand out a bit more if need be, but I actually like the simplicity of it. And it stands out on the non-Portal pages anyway.

Quote from payne

Good job on that. As yourself and others have said, that white thingy has to be changed. Have you tried setting it to a more "grey" color?

Yeah I have, and it looked okay. The Post view looks great to me with that, but the rest seem to be too dark. I dunno. Eh, I'll probably just keep the darker version.





EDIT:
I just realized I forgot to add the subtitle to the Post view. I'd probably have it as a smaller size and put it to the right of the title. The issue with that, though, is that the subtitle would then have a small character limit. I don't think we even need the subtitle to be that long anyway, since it is mostly used to put days/nights/turns for games or release info for maps.

Quote from DevliN

I don't think we even need the subtitle to be that long anyway, since it is mostly used to put days/nights/turns for games or release info for maps.

Or to explain what the topic actually is (e.g., "Help Me Pls, mobile grid not placing units properly").

The post view screenshot went from my least favorite to most favorite. I think the navigation bar is perfect and would discourage you increasing its complexity. The one thing still bugging me a little bit is the headers, probably in the same way the posts were bugging me earlier.

Also, the image in the Latest News section kinda bothers me as well. Maybe because it's covering up a stretched out bar. I dunno.

Quote from Roy

Quote from DevliN

I don't think we even need the subtitle to be that long anyway, since it is mostly used to put days/nights/turns for games or release info for maps.

Or to explain what the topic actually is (e.g., "Help Me Pls, mobile grid not placing units properly").

Haha yeah, I suppose. Maybe the lack of a subtitle will force people to actually title things appropriately.

Quote from Roy

The post view screenshot went from my least favorite to most favorite. I think the navigation bar is perfect and would discourage you increasing its complexity. The one thing still bugging me a little bit is the headers, probably in the same way the posts were bugging me earlier.

I agree, it definitely has turned into my favorite as well. I tried the headers without the white borders, and the whole thing felt too green, and very disconnected from the Portal page. When I have time later, I can make a version without it. It'll probably look better without them, ultimately, but I dunno. I feel like the it really is too green.

Quote from Roy

Also, the image in the Latest News section kinda bothers me as well. Maybe because it's covering up a stretched out bar. I dunno.

Hmm I dunno what to say about this one. The only thing I don't like is the crappy gloss gradient I put on it at the last minute. I kind of like the idea of it over the bar, myself. I originally planned to put it under, but the bar looked massive without being covered.

EDIT:
Here's how it looks without any of the white (and I realize the spacing is a little off on some of these):


This one looks waaaay too green to me, so I changed it to the following:


I like this one, but it seems very dark, and very disconnected from the Portal page. SEN seems to always be a very dark-themed site, but that feels old to me. Both of these certainly look cleaner, so I'd probably go with this one of the two. Or perhaps taking a note from Turtle, the gray could be for read forums while the green is for unread? I dunno.


I actually kind of miss the white on this one. I'm not sure why, but this was the one time where I actually liked it (other than the Portal).

I really don't like all that white. I'm pretty sure it should be more grey.
Also, SEN's logo really shouldn't be the same white color as the nav-bar and such.
The little connection bar with our username at the right of the screen shouldn't be the same color as the nav-bar.
A way to make it less dark than on your 2nd picture of the last post would probably be to change sub-forum's green background of the 1st picture to some other taint of green, but make it contrast more compared to the primary-forums' headers.

Quote from payne

I really don't like all that white. I'm pretty sure it should be more grey.

On the Portal page? I like the white. Sorry.

Quote from payne

Also, SEN's logo really shouldn't be the same white color as the nav-bar and such.

I don't really see a problem with this. Looks fine to me.

Quote from payne

The little connection bar with our username at the right of the screen shouldn't be the same color as the nav-bar.

I tried keeping everything on that line similar, but this one I agree with. Maybe I'll change it.

Quote from payne

A way to make it less dark than on your 2nd picture of the last post would probably be to change sub-forum's green background of the 1st picture to some other taint of green, but make it contrast more compared to the primary-forums' headers.

The issue I had with it was the gray on more gray. I think the green is fine.

Verdana forever!

Fixed-width skin? Do want.

Personally though I think the navbar and login area needs to be something other than white. Maybe grayish, or even dark with white font or green font?

I like the gray page over the green page, also.

I like the white on the portal but it hurts my eyes man... Consider altering it please

Actually, Devlin, could you PM me (or just post it here) the Photoshop file please? I would love to mess around with it.

Please if/when a new skin emerges, take note of images and image sizes. The site is already chock full of huge numbers of images. The banner itself is made up of 8 images when it could be made up of 2-4, easily, taking up half the space. Likewise, many of the images would do better as jpgs rather than pngs (even with transparency, since you can use a png file to define a jpg's alpha channel). And of course, nearly all images can be compressed dramatically if you just save them straight out of gimp/photoshop by using 3rd party tools.

Using CSS sprites as well would be extremely beneficial.