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Joe B

Hi Joe,

I tried both MMT 4 and MMt3.

MMT 3 is IMHO much to "stressful" on the eyes. Too much dark colors, and generally the contrasts are too high, or -in case of the grey text on black underground (which can't hardly be read), not high enough.

MMT 4 is much better, I'm still using it at the moment.... although I could imagine it becoming a bit too tiring or distracting too ...after a while, but I'm not sure.

Generally I believe it's better to go with colors that are less "striking", more "opaque " (if that's the right English word for it).
The standard light blue and white tones, as boring as they were, were quite good at "not getting in the way" etc.  But I personally think it's better to go for warmer tones (than blue)....and I believe the color system of the old forums (with their orange/yellow-ish tones) was very good: not too "attention-grabbing", yet still warm.

I am 100% with aquaMat here.

One other comment: for me the headlines should not be paler than the color of the subtext which is done in MMT4. Just the other way around  :)

I'm just about done with MMT8 which I personally like because of the midnight coloring. I've also tried a couple of the graphics I'm going to use and they look outstanding (again in my opinion) I have to fix a coupple of more things and then I'll post here when you can take a look.

Thanks for the feedback!

Joe B

OK MMT8 is ready to look at.

MMT4 was the last template I did totally with the YaBB template editor. Since then I have been using Dreamweaver to put together the CSS sheets and it has worked a lot better. Even so there are still some little things that must be tweaked to get it all to look tight. Again, right now I'm just  trying to get a general idea of what everyone thinks.
I've also got a solution for the hints issue (how to present "cheats" without everyone seeing them if they don't want to).

Keep sending feedback!!!!

joe B

OH MAN did I just get a SHOCK!!!!!!!!!

I tried the new templates under Safari (I use Firefox) and IE on the Mac and IE on Windows. Safari doesn't parse the CSS file the same way as Firefox. And IE on windows has a totally different color set.

Back to the drawing board.......


Joe B

Heh, you had to pull me in via email. I'd had the Announcements board collapsed because there's rarely if ever anything posted here I'm interested in.

General comments:

• Doggie-doo brown? Really? Wouldn't have been my first choice, but the colors are generally well-coordinated. (If you're asking my first choice I'll share, but it would take mocking up.  :-?)
  
• I hate it when sites change the textarea background. It makes the insertion point all but impossible to see (Safari is leaving it black. This is probably a bug.)
  
• The a:visited color stands out more than a:link.
  
• There are still many artifacts of the old style that I assume you're cleaning up, such as name colors that don't fit and images that don't work. (The blue/yellow checkmark icons are particularly problematic. The blue stands out quite a bit and the yellow is so ignorable it's almost invisible.)
  
• I like the icon, but it could use a border.
  

I just had a quick look at the CSS. UGH! Not a single ID selector to be found. How annoying is that?  >:(

Anyway, I haven't a clue what's going wrong with Safari. Since I don't know what was changed from the default, I'm not in a position to offer insight. Sorry. :(

An addendum: This shot of my Firefox errors console might help. The highlighted line in particular looks fishy. That "border: 1px; #666666 solid" should definitely read "border: 1px solid #666;" and may very well be the source of all (or most) of your CSS parsing problems.

---

Yes, doggy-doo brown....
Trying to match the background of the graphic. Actually I moved a little up from the original colors for that very reason. If you think THESE look doggy-doo............. It had started out with a reference to the old board being kind of orangey colored. That was WAY to bright especially since I know of at least one person out there who has a color issue and the red component bloomed too much into the text and made it less readable

No it shouldn't be #666. As far as I know all color specifications are 6 digits, 2 hexadecimal digits (0-255) for each color component, RGB.

As far as what's really got me annoyed is that Safari refuses to show the CODE colors correctly. I was going to use that for the hints issue. If you look at the forum using Firefox and look in the Here We Go section you'll see a reply from me that has DON'T RESPOND TO THIS, yada,yada,yada..... If you look at that post and go to the CODE box (solid black) you can't see the text AT ALL unless you highlight it and no matter what your default highlight color is the text will be readable. But unless I can find out what the Safari issue is that's going to be a problem. Another weird thing is that the category coloring is as it should be and it's defined the same way (although with a different name) as the section coloring. I posted on the forum board about it because we're kind of stuck with their (YaBB) variables in the CSS sheet and if Safari has a problem with that I don't see what can be done except rewriting all the Perl script with different var names. OH BOY, WHAT FUN!!!!!

Yes, there are a ton of little tweaks but until I've got the overall look set I'm not going there.

Last but not least I guess that'll teach you to not look at the WHOLE board........

Thanks for the feedback,

Joe B

doggy doo hmmmmmmmm..............

Quote:

No it shouldn't be #666. As far as I know all color specifications are 6 digits, 2 hexadecimal digits (0-255) for each color component, RGB.

If the color consists of 3 pairs of two digits, then it can be abbreviated. Thus #666666 becomes #666 and #AABBCC becomes #ABC.

Try it and see. :)

PS I wouldn't worry too much about matching the background of the image. If it looks out of place just put a border around it.

Besides, I think the way it is now (background of page is close to background of image but still not matched) looks worse than it would if the two were strongly contrasting. The former looks "wrong"; your eyes want them to match up but they don't, leading me to opine that it could use a border. When I set the theme back to the default I thought the image looked fine on a white background, border or no.

PSS I'm not sure you realized what you were getting into when you asked for my opinion. Web design is my job, and I have a lot of strong opinions about it. :P

No problem with opinions. Didn't know about the color shorthand, very cool. I found the issue. Dreamweaver puts some stuff in that the board doesn't like, I removed it and now it's happy in both browsers. YAY!!!!! Of course now I can work on doggy-doo.
PLEASE send me any ideas you have, at least somebody is. And to tell the truth I could use the help. I haven't done website design in years and most of that was putting php code for SQL access into supplied templates. BTW, lets do this via email. I just wanted to have feedback here and if we go technical we'll get way off track,

thanks,

joeb

I haven't been on for awhile. Wow, the nice new themes. I like the #5 one the best. But the one with mostly brown/orage, is kinda okward, because the colors are abit too dark. Also, the grey on the #5 one on the background is kinda not-with the color, but its the best theme I could find. Anyways...

Keep up the good work,
Wingy

Thanks Wingy!

Is the graphic showing up with Jack sitting at the table?


Thanks,

Joe B

yeah, i have the gold and orange background on the site. Its a cool idea!  8-)

joeb wrote on 19.05.2007 at 04:47:17:

...Is the graphic showing up with Jack sitting at the table?...

Yeah I see it, and I'm overjoyed! That YaBB thing was getting very repetitive every time I got on the forums. It looked... too cheap, dull, that sorta thing. The company should come out with a logo abit... like, you know, better. ;)

::)