New skin suggestions

[dalin]

i thought i might try slapping together a new skin for our lovely forums... ill open the floor to any suggestions or requests for the look of the skin...

so, any ideas?

[Mark]

Perhaps a different main color than brown?

[plasma06]

what about a sky blue with some clouds

[kilo]

I grown to like brown on forums, similar to the guildwars.ogaming and this one. The color is very easy on the eyes . But more options are always cool, maybe a sky one like plasma said, or something with Aion's environments.

[Dominai]

Technically the current skin has a lot of good points, and I like the comments others have made in favour of clouds/blue, as Aion has some fantastically painted clouds and some really nice blues.

But, blues and clouds tend to become very bright and not so easy on the eyes, maybe take advantage of the greens in the Aion colour palette? They do tend to look a little sickly, but with the right texture on the main background, you could probably pull it off. Or... you could have the nice bright key catching cloud title, with the demon-esque darker colors over the main page.. possibly with a .css bg float in the bottom right hand corner of the screen of a bulky/flying demon if you can have the code implemented for the skin.

[Dez]

Aye a new color would indeed be refreshing, the brown is abit .. brownish

[kilo]

Originally Posted by Dominai

Technically the current skin has a lot of good points, and I like the comments others have made in favour of clouds/blue, as Aion has some fantastically painted clouds and some really nice blues.

But, blues and clouds tend to become very bright and not so easy on the eyes, maybe take advantage of the greens in the Aion colour palette? They do tend to look a little sickly, but with the right texture on the main background, you could probably pull it off. Or... you could have the nice bright key catching cloud title, with the demon-esque darker colors over the main page.. possibly with a .css bg float in the bottom right hand corner of the screen of a bulky/flying demon if you can have the code implemented for the skin.

A dark green, lush forest kind would be awesome.

[Andarel]

Originally Posted by Dez

Aye a new color would indeed be refreshing, the brown is abit .. brownish

Haven't you heard? Real is brown.

I dunno. I think this skin is neato... but perhaps one of the soaring dragon figures(the ones we keep seeing animated flying overhead in the vids) in the background? Deep shadowed blue is another color that's good on the eyes.

[Dez]

Yeah It should be a color that is comfy for the eyes, whereas the current color ain't if you ask me. I imagine some variation of blue or green would look nice.

[dalin]

excellent... getting a good collective feeling here towards darker shades of green and blue...

@mark... if i come up with the design in photoshop, are you comfortable enough the with VBulletin admin interface (and CSS) to "cut up" the design, and implement it?

i suppose we could take this conversation to chat as it gets closer to actual testing or implementation... the neat thing with VBulletin is that you can apply a live skin that only the admin can see... really helps from a testing perspective...

[Dominai]

Could always take the colour spectrum from here, use the darker blues, use the lighter end of the scale around the title, and then possibly take the spectrum and Image>Adjustments>Hue/Saturation... then Colorize to a nice set of greens for accent work.

With some nifty css you could have the bright top imagery leading to a cut off of water, with a dark blue underwater styled repeating or non repeating mid section and then a darker bottom.

[Mark]

Hmm, that's iffy, dalin. I do have our current skin and it's CSS .xml on hand if you'd like to see it. I could probably get the colors right, after a significant amount of time.

[Dominai]

Not sure if you mean getting the hex code for colors Mark, but if you print screen or drag in an image with the colors you want, just use the eyedropper tool and pick the hex code out of the palette menu. If thats not what you're on about, sorry.

Just wondering, any negative issues surrounding using a flash page title?

[dalin]

well, only had a few minutes to play around in photoshop this afternoon, but i came up with this concept as a rough first pass...

i purposely kept the current structure to allow for easier integration...

thoughts?

edit: removed the thumbnail, as it would cause some annoying imageshack popups... just click the "this concept" link above...

note: the template would end with the blue patterned border... there wouldnt be any of the extra whitespace on the outsides...

[Mark]

I'm uploading a file (or two) for you, dalin. I'll PM you when it's done.