A skin appears!

[Dusty]

This was a shocker. I'm not sure if I like or hate the contrast going on. I'll give it a few days to see if I adjust.

[Arne]

I don't like it. Most buttons are mystery meat and since nothing is color coded it takes a while to find things. It's too much of a... how shall I put it... graphical design masturbation.

A comparison could be if every icon on your desktop or dock was changed to a brown simple silhouette and all file names were hidden. That would be pretty confusing, wouldn't it?

Personally I'd prefer something like:



Or just anything with a colored picture for my eye can find. Since this is a pixel art board, it should preferably be a well pixeled and fun picture. This way when I look at the buttons, my eyes will take the shape of... content beans, like in Ren & Stimpy.

Well, those are my inclinations.

[Larwick]

Oooh. I really love the colours. 

[Arne]

Yeah, the color scheme is nice, although personally I prefer a gray-teal as a neutral color. You know, the boring Windows 95 desktop color, except light gray.

[miascugh]

@ Arne: Sorry to hear this, and it also... feels unusual to be guilty of graphical masturbation.. I didn't even realize how much the graphic design people I've been hanging (/have had to hang) out with the last couple of years seem to have influenced me, since that's actually something I'm not inclined to or interested in at all. I used to think at least ):

The reduced approach felt right from my perspective as in thinking of rectangular pixel-level boldness, totally detached from figurative videogame-ish aesthetics.

What I do agree with, something I was worried would prove true, are the immediate readability issues. Nothing a second look wouldn't remedy, but still uncomfortable.


Also, thanks for all the positive feedback as well, anyone


Edit: I actually agree entirely with you about the lack of color-code and detail/readability/character in general, and will gladly tend to fixing that. I'm afraid, though, not any too soon. I rushed through these in two days because I've got a great deal of distraction coming up the next few weeks, so you'll have to bear with them for the time being.

[Photocopier]

wow this was a surprising but attractive change

The Email icon is a bit ugly I think. but otherwise, great work 

[Atnas]

I love the colors soooo much. But I'm with Arne, there really should be more distinguishable icons. More color, more substance! I'm not too unhappy with the home help, search etc, because they are solid objects but the icons below the avatar and the reply, print, send to, etc icons are really just too... paper thin and monotone. The reply button has improved for sure, though!

I mean, a lot of people do pixel art for games and to have abstracted silhouettes for icons just doesn't feel the closest to home for me.

[Kren]

is the logo also going to change? everything changed except that. .

[#36005A]

@ #36005A:

 I'll look into your color suggestions.

Thanks. Let me know if I need to clarify anything about my suggestions.

Unfortunately I am well aware of the two css issues with Chrome (and other webkit browsers as well I suppose. I don't have access to Safari right now... It would be really nice if you could check on that on your Mac ), I guess I'll have to look into and resort to browser-specific trickery.

Just replicated both of them in Safari, but only the "search button" one in Firefox. The header thing must be Webkit, not sure what's going on with the search button.

The irregular button sizes I am aware of too, but that's beyond my control since the icq and yahoo messenger icons are fetched from an external server, thus inconsistent. About the colors, I used the two recurring saturated colors orange and teal correspondingly to the dominant colors yellow and blue of the AIM and MSN logo respectively in an attempt to assure recognizability without deviating from the skins palette. I think it works.

Interesting. I was actually mostly talking about horizontal size, I understand about ICQ and others. Maybe make all of your buttons follow ICQ in terms of width (and height, accounting for the transparency at the top). Or, at the very least, you could have a set width for the icons you make.

Also, I have to ask, and I don't mean this as a personal attack, but I'm merely curious: If you are not interested at all in graphic design, why did you take on the task of redesigning a website? You seem to have done a pretty great job, so I am surprised to hear you say that. Or did you just mean that "graphical masturbation" is not something you're interested in/inclined to? My apologies if I've misunderstood.

[fil_razorback]

Great work. I love the new skin.

Slight margin issue in the bottom though (FF 3.6) :