New front page design contest (Ends Aug 5th!!!)

[Jops]

Well, i just felt like drawing her again...

Here it is Joel.


It works well on a dark background.

[Kris X]

Really not a big fan of the yellow in the logo.

EDIT: Nor a fan of red and blue together.

[Joel Fagin]

Version 2

New font, new colour scheme and a new Chan (thank you, Jops). Genre icons are missing, although I did manage to leave Genchan's hand completely attached this time.

I also fiddled with the layout slightly in order to seperate the legal and copyright messages from the main window.

Let me know what you think.

- Joel Fagin

[Sortelli]

Your art rocks, Jops.

[Cortland]

Hrmmm. I'm not a big fan of the glow. It makes the page a bit hard to look at. There's also some discord with the hue between the page and our little mascot--the blue is too close to match and not different enough to contrast. Maybe we can try a gold background instead? Light text on dark background is sometimes hard to read.

If you want, I could give it a go myself if it isn't too late.

[Mercury Hat]

I think the royal blue of the main background should be toned down just a tad, it's quite bright as it is now. Other than that, looks pretty good to me.

[Cortland]

I played with your colors a bit, Joel. I thought it might be nice to bring the gold from the top panel into some other parts of the layout, and maybe turn the background blue upa bit to separate it from the black around it.

[Joel Fagin]

Last one for a bit. Glow gone (Although I'm not 100% convinced of that one yet I found a way of doing it without reducing it to a boring white logo), Genchan's aquired a shadow and the background blue has been darkened.

Edit: Whoops. Didn't see you there, Cortland. I'll try that out later but I've a comic to do now.

- Joel Fagin

[[AlmightyPyro]]

I like the glow better.

[Q_Slash]

In your second design Joel, the yellow glow makes the grey look sickly. I think I just plain don't like the yellow. Maybe make the yellow black instead in the third design?

I'm also not too fond of the circles. Maybe have them appear as roll overs? Even though Kisai said no. But I find all of them there looks too cluttered. And if they are all going to have a small image in them, all those images could clash. One at a time is better in my opinion. But so far, your third design is the best out of all the options presented.

[The Neko]

Are those the categories we're going with? Because I'd rather see more generalized branding like "humor" "fantasy" "sci-fi", etc. Maybe a few of the odd categories that house a large variety of comics (i.e. "anthropomorphic" and "manga").

[Joel Fagin]

I think I just plain don't like the yellow. Maybe make the yellow black instead in the third design?

It does rather need a third colour, particularly with grey in it since that's a very blah colour. Black doesn't really count because it's the background colour. It's like drawing in white-out on paper.

I'm also not too fond of the circles.

That's just sample content. I wouldn't worry about it.*

Are those the categories we're going with?

More sample content and not really my department anyway. They're dependant on what the Guide can do.

- Joel Fagin

* Yet.

[Squis]

Mercury Hat and Joel, I find your designs awesome and very professionally done! Me gusta the big search bar(s)! I like the big "Guide"-button on Merc's page, but it could use a little more "buttony"-look... maybe lose the CG-logo there?

What disturbs me with both is the background:

Merc's heavy use of black in the foreground clashes with the light blue in the back giving it a kind of "shy feeling"... like you weren't daring to go all the way. Joel's black background gives it a spacy floating feeling... but not in a good way... almost like you're trying too hard.

I have the urge to write "Both designs are too flashy and yet not flashy enough at the same time"... a big help that would do.

Anyway I'll try to come up with a design, hopefully before the 5th.

[Kisai]

A few words on Joel's design.

I like it. It's more elegant than Mercury Hat's design. I'd like to see it in HTML. Having GenChan by many artists rotated around may also help, and I got to do an anthro version...

Do be forewarned, using point sizes for fonts screws it up on my screen -- I'm running 135 dpi, and for some reason fonts go larger than that DPI. If you wish to be consistant, please use pixel sizes in your CSS Style sheets.

oh ew, no. That defeats the purpose.

If anything the font should be listed as either EM or % 1em or 100%= system "medium" or "normal" size. Therefor people who have 144dpi screens don't get screwed by 72dpi "pixel" font sizes.

Check css rules.

IMO, it fails, if I select "largest" and the text goes everywhere, which is why I wasn't too happy with tables the first time around.

I'm going to be less picky this time if it works out of the box. I had to do some modifications to RPin's design so that it would stretch without leaving 3" of space on both sides of my screen"

[Joel Fagin]

I'm going to be less picky this time if it works out of the box. I had to do some modifications to RPin's design so that it would stretch without leaving 3" of space on both sides of my screen"

Do you want it to stretch? I designed mine without that in mind - mainly because Gen-chan kinda makes it hard - but it occurred to me a while ago that it might be possible anyway.

But there's bound to be big gaps somewhere. Either side of the logo if nothing else. I wish the things would resize themselves like Flash does.

Anyway I'll try to come up with a design, hopefully before the 5th.

Coooooool!

- Joel Fagin

[Kisai]

I'd totally whip up a gen-chan for this, provided black and white is cool with y'all.

Colour is a huge plus in situations like this. Or, very stylish black and white (see: Sin City ). Still, you could ask someone else to colour it.

Question for Kisai: I've mentioned this before, but is it possible to have a series of genre links on the main page - say, for Fantasy comics, Sci-fi* comics, Manga and so on - which link to a Guide page of that genre? It'd be so much nicer than just the one Guide link. That thing is daunting.

- Joel Fagin

* I realise the Guide doesn't actually have a sci-fi field but it's got androids, future and so on. Anyway, we only have to do the genres which are possible.

Genre links are fine, but I might be migrating the guide to a Wiki instead, all depends on how easy it is to do things with it, I'm so not getting stuck. (siteadmin,phpbb,philex,proftpd,pureftpd all use the same authentication scheme, mediawiki uses something comparable, but didn't leave a way plug it's authentication in...)

Anyways, I've seen your layout/design, I think it looks pretty nice, but I'm kinda worried about the use of images in some of the places.

Here's a test, it doesn't need to pass this test perfectly, but you can't test it unless you have it in html.

Goto 100% font size or "Medium" . Switch to "Large" or "Largest", the text shouldn't break anything, the site should still be legible. (Firefox, CTRL++), Then reduce the font size a little.

I'm not too concerned if it doesn't display properly on my pocketPC, a stripped down page could be generated for that. However my main concern is people's laptop's and 19" LCD panels that run natively 1920x1600 and such. Most people can "see" the site, no matter what resolution, but they also need to be able to read it, and that is where pixel/pica/point sizes fail, the browsers won't resize them.

As for genres, some people are overly spammy with their guide selections... I really need to put the weighting system in.

[Jops]

Your art rocks, Jops.

Tnx ^^

[Mercury Hat]

The light blue in my background was the very first color I picked, I can certainly darken it like so (nevermind the giant text, I was testing for breakage like Kisai said). I tried a darker bg color and swapped the lighter blue into the tables instead of plain white.

I'm no good with fancy, pizazz-y site design .

[STrRedWolf]

I can see putting GenChan in a Div layer that floats over things. We can use GIF for the transparent GenChan and PNG's for the shadows.

Does IE support PNG alpha channels now?

[Kisai]

I can see putting GenChan in a Div layer that floats over things. We can use GIF for the transparent GenChan and PNG's for the shadows.

Does IE support PNG alpha channels now?

IE7 will, IE5.5+ has a trick that can be used, just keep in mind that using the IE trick requires making a IE-only page OR a script that is loaded to swap the png to the DirectX alpha render http://webfx.eae.net/dhtml/pngbehavior/pngbehavior.html

I have said script on the guide.