new comixpedia design

RE: new comixpedia design

by Xaviar Xerexes - 01/10/2005 - 11:15

I agree with you on the link color - I need to change that. The olive color scheme (other than the blue linked text color) tees off of Chris Crosby's cover and the color scheme for the site will change from month to month based on the cover art.

I also need to figure out why the forums are still themeless (PNphpBB2 is not picking up the theme properly).

The logo was just a reworking of last year's logo for this month. I'm not entirely sure if it will hang around or not - it's still a mouse and a circle like last year's though.

As far as navigating the site there's always a trade-off between cramming in lots of options and clicking through to what you want to find. If people tell me that some feature is too hard to find or use now I'd like to hear it - if I can respond to specific requests I will.

And if anyone was interested in designing a POSTNUKE theme for Comixpedia I would happily take a look at it to see if we could use it. There are two primary theme systems for Postnuke - Xanthia which is standard with it and Autotheme which we also use. It also occurs to me that it's possible for anyone who wanted to work on it to make a theme that was specific to their webcomic - I don't think we'd use that as a primary theme but it's possible we could let users here select their own alternate "skin" for Comixpedia (you'd have to log in to see it).

Anyhow - just ramblin' -- I'm still drinking coffee to wake up :)

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RE: new comixpedia design

by Uncle Ghastly - 01/10/2005 - 11:17

Yeah, the light blue isn't cutting it. Try something in the gold/amber/dark brown end of the spectrum.

Incidently, in the recent forum posts section at the side of the front page you should have a button that takes you instantly to the last page of the conversation. Makes for fewer clicks for those of us who are following a thread.

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RE: new comixpedia design

by Xaviar Xerexes - 01/10/2005 - 12:01

Ghastly -

I too want that feature but I haven't seen it supported by PNphpBB2 yet. Maybe there's a hack that I can use though - I'll dig around.

I was waiting for a color recommendation from the crack Comixpedia website squad before changing it but maybe I'll try something in that range now.

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RE: new comixpedia design

by Scotty Arsenault - 01/10/2005 - 12:10

I'd also say that you should decide on a logo and stick to it! If you don't mind a bit of marketing talk, it can be hard to establish yourself among all the other comic news sites if the identity of the site keeps changing every couple months. (Even though I, and many others visit here every day! ;) I'm a make a couple logos for you too. At least clean up the jaggies around this incarnation! (shudder)

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RE: new comixpedia design

by DJ_Coffman - 01/10/2005 - 13:48

I love love love Comixpedia. But it definitly looks like it just fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down! :)

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Re: RE: new comixpedia design

by Tim Tylor - 01/10/2005 - 13:57

The logo's a bit mystifying if you don't know what it is - now you've mentioned the mouse I can see it with its buttons and cable, but I'd never have recognised it otherwise.

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New Design But Not Done I Guess -

by Xaviar Xerexes - 01/10/2005 - 14:14

Ouch Ouch Ouch! I guess I'm not "proud" of any websites - it's just not my expertise or talent really - but I didn't think it was fugly. Really just getting the skeleton right (which isn't done, I need to turn the code to CSS and get rid of mondo-tables) would be nice. I'm going to skin the colors each month to tee off of the cover art - the greens were pulled from Crosby's cover. So if it's the color scheme - well hopefully someone else (cough, Bill or Wednesday) will choose next month's color scheme more wisely :) I think you'll see a gradual cleanup and improvement of this to the point where it's "done" (or something else entirely, but "done", will appear I guess) - but right now I'm trying to fix/change the obvious things. And really - no one loved last year's theme! The hate for this one is not nearly as much (yet) :)

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by William_G - 01/10/2005 - 14:55

I like the background color. The links need to be improved, but other than that I think things are pretty.

My weighty opinion: If you're going to have a softer color scheme, I think you should find some good text colors other than pure black to go with the background. And whatever color you decide upon for text, make that the color of the borders around each of your tables/ newsboxes/ whatever they're called.

the black is too heavy and it taking attention away from the rest of the page.

I think the left most column is too wide... at least in my browser (Mozilla). I think it should be no wider than 25% - 30% since it's not really vital information.

Too bad about postnuke being a crank.

Over all, a good step forward.

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Re: RE: new comixpedia design

by DJ_Coffman - 01/10/2005 - 16:01

[quote="timtylor"]

[quote="xerexes"]

The logo was just a reworking of last year's logo for this month. I'm not entirely sure if it will hang around or not - it's still a mouse and a circle like last year's though.[/quote]

The logo's a bit mystifying if you don't know what it is - now you've mentioned the mouse I can see it with its buttons and cable, but I'd never have recognised it otherwise.[/quote]

You know I'm only kidding around. Hahaha -- I'm no DaVinci when it comes to site design and crap either. I'm never happy with it.

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RE: Re: RE: new comixpedia design

by Tim Tylor - 01/10/2005 - 16:53

One other grumble - the links in the forum are coming out in a smaller font than the surrounding text, so they look a little odd.

Grouches aside, it's a pretty decent job. :) I like the idea of the changing color-scheme.

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RE: Re: RE: new comixpedia design

by Katie Sekelsky - 01/10/2005 - 17:10

My comments are pretty much the same as most... The link color needs changing. However, I too like the changing color-scheme idea. But I do miss the logo from before. I know it's basically the same thing, but it used to be more clean and clear as to what it actually is. Now it's jaggy and kind of looks like the letter "G."

Oh, and I like the navigation bar at the top as well.

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RE: Re: RE: new comixpedia design

by Uncle Ghastly - 01/10/2005 - 17:12

G is for Ghastly, that's good enough for me.

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RE: Re: RE: new comixpedia design

by Anonymous - 01/10/2005 - 18:31

Despite Ghastly's enthusiasm, :) I think we'll be replacing the jagged mouse logo pretty soon. At least temporarily, I'll put some version of last year's logo back up there.

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by Anonymous - 01/10/2005 - 20:51

To be honest I think I preferred the old design and logo. It was more... bold. This one just feels all pastelly and pale and lacks the punch.

The varying fonts sizes for normal text and links are rather problematic... and the light blue links... :(

I'm embarassed to admit this, but I didn't recognise the logo for what it was. *blushes* Now that you mention it, it IS the mouse...

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by Xaviar Xerexes - 01/10/2005 - 22:58

Sketchy Mouse in Circle logo I banish thee!!

Okay meet mouse in circle logo which is lifted straight from last year's version. This particular gif of it is less then smooth but I hope to have a cleaner version up within 24 hours or so.

In even better news I figured out why PN had been borking the forum theme. Forums fixed - I left them blue and I'm inclined to leave the forums the same color month to month no matter what colors we change the issue pages with the monthly cover. Unless everyone tells me otherwise.

I see what you mean about text/link sizes, etc. I think it's another PN to CSS thing I'm not implementing right. I'll work on it !

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by Airsick_Moth - 01/11/2005 - 04:25

I really, really prefer the blue forum color scheme to the front page. It... it looks like the internet couldn't hold down its pea soup. And and and there's a strangely large amount of whitespace all over the front page, like some fonts are too big, some too small. It's... ugly.

I probably sound like a jerk, I'm sorry. -_- If you want to ignore the previous paragraph, I would say that this looks a lot more amateurish than the old version.

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I think something like this

by Anonymous - 01/11/2005 - 05:15

I think something like this looks a lot better. That banner isn't going to look good anywhere, I say put it somewhere else, maybe where it can be bigger.

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The links are looking much

by Rick - 01/11/2005 - 08:23

The links are looking much better now! ;)

As for the new design, here are my suggestions. Just so I don't sound like I'm being completely negative, let me start off by saying that I love reading Comixpedia and definitely appreciate all the hard work that goes into it. The new (or current, as it may be) color scheme is a vast improvement in regards to readability.

However, these are the changes I would make...

Get rid of the thick black boxes that border all of the news and other menu items. Either use a single pixel border, or no border at all.

However, make each of the columns in the 3-column layout have a different background color, and each of the actual text boxes or menu items should have alternating background colors that compliment the column color. This is, I think, the one change you could make right now that would instantly improve the readability of the front page.

The left and right columns (the menu and the ads, presumably) probably should have the same background color and the center column with the important stuff (the news) should use a different color.

I also think that the Comixpedia logo (whatever it ends up being), should be placed to the left of the guest-artist's cover image, not as a separate banner or image above it.

And finally, as far as switching the color-scheme every month... I have to admit I'm a bit wary of this. If the site had a more distinctive look and feel, one that was immediately recognizable as "Comixpedia", I think it'd be a great idea. As it stands right now, though, I don't think there's enough of a distinction between the look of Comixpedia's front page and any of a hundred other websites that use the 3-column layout to make switching colors every month worthwhile. I think, without a stronger design, switching colors often would only detract from the site.

(Of course, another possible option is to allow visitors to select their own color schemes... That's easily doable via CSS (or so I'm told).)

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BB code weird...

by glych - 03/15/2006 - 23:26

The comments don't allow for the BB Code to work properly yet, but I'm sure that bug will be fixed soon.

^_^

-glych

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