Project Forum Skin - Part 1: Color Scheme

We were discussing ideas and we decided it'd be cool to make a new forum skin for Smash World Forums. It's gonna be slick, make no mistake. This thread will be for keeping progress and ideas organized as this develops.

We've already got artists and others to work on this, but who knows if we'll need more people later on. A few new features we hope to include:

-New icons
-New page header
-New imagery theme (the other skins have a lot of Melee imagery)
-1024 x 768 resolution

Nothing's concrete yet, but we want this thing to turn out as amazing as possible.

This skin will be used by members all over SWF (we hope), so it wouldn't make sense for us to just design it as we saw fit without any input. We want to know what members want to see in a new skin, so that whatever our final product is can appeal to a lot of people. So it would help us out if people could give us some suggestions about color scheme, design, what fonts they would like to see, etc. along the way and we'll do our best to work them into the design. Like I said before, the skin's for everyone and we want it to turn out successfully.

Thanks for reading all that and hopefully we can get started pretty soon, and then start getting some feedback from members.

The third image points out some of the sections that are linked and cannot be changed individually. Most of the stuff up top I don't have marked as I believe most of it is individually set with those custom images. If you want to think of edits for them, just keep in mind how they are currently. Certain things I'm sure can be edited though, like how large the top left image is and how large the buttons are (and I'm talking vertical and horizontal). Some things like the size of the advertising banners and sections can not be changed.

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:D

Just to let others know, this isn't some random project we just decided on our own to come up with. This is quite serious, and we have discussed with admins about the likelihood of a newly created skin being implemented.

We have received neither a concrete no or yes, but some have been more than supportive of the idea. If we can come up with a great design and some awesome mockups, I'm sure we can get the go ahead to build the skin on the site.



One of the primary things to begin with is color scheme, which we could always use feedback on. Right now we were thinking of keeping the theme fairly dark, as I'm sure that's what the majority of the website would prefer. Perhaps a light version of this skin could be implemented later.

As for other colors, we were thinking of switching the primary focus from yellow to include more reds and oranges. Perhaps some silver elements thrown in as well. This would be in an effort to make the skin appear more Brawl-themed (think of the logo: red/silver/fire).


In any case, I'm going to try and create a few template images, for anyone to edit or throw ideas on. Eventually the final design will be in this template form, and we will present it to the admins for approval.


Also, let us know if you have experience with editing skins or with CSS. For now we're mostly planning to just re-skin the default forum skin, but if there were some people here who were more experienced with CSS that could perhaps help us with a new heading design (different button placement, cleaner implementation of the various links that appear when hovering over the header buttons), that'd be awesome.

:O

I swear people who are even aware you can access those old skins are in the minority. In any case, we'll be looking for a lot of feedback from the community in any form. For this phase we're mostly working on the design as well, which means lots of Photoshop

Whenever we get templates up, I would hope the community takes a crack at it and throws in their ideas as well. Our goal is to get a design that pleases the majority of the community :D

In lieu of Tom posting this...Sepia.

dragonblooded said:

Anyway, I'd love to offer feedback for this. I don't have the skills to help with design or anything, so this is just the view of a random site member.

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Lol, that's exactly what we need. The more 'random' members that express their opinions, the more likely it is we can come to a compromise on a color scheme that a lot of people can agree on. You have some good ideas... I'm going to try them out soon. Keep 'em coming, people! We want to hear everyone's thoughts about the colors.

I think I just got another idea for a scheme myself...

I'm kinda looking for a variety in colors too. Right now we got blue, different blue, and grey. Not a big selection.

I am liking the idea of orange and red though, as long as the general theme stays on the darker side. A bright smashboards doesn't seem right to me, so I think some black and grey needs to stay.

Yeah, that was a main thing I suggested when we were coming up with this project. The overall darkness to the theme (the blacks and grays) will have to stay, or else we'd definitely face huge backlash from the majority of the community.

I do like the idea of creating an alternate, lighter version after the dark one though.

Well, I was typing up a lengthy explanation a couple days ago, then SWF crashed. Anyways, I cooked up an image detailing the colors I think we should focus on:

Well, one of our goals is to make the theme more Brawl oriented, seeing as how it is now the larger focus of these boards, and it will help make everything feel more new and up-to-date. Although yes, I can't quite see where you were going with the orange-red, yellow, and green most of all @_@

Perhaps if you were to edit them into these (which I also just put into my second post in this thread), I'd have a better idea :



The third image points out some of the sections that are linked and cannot be changed individually. Most of the stuff up top I don't have marked as I believe most of it is individually set with those custom images. If you want to think of edits for them, just keep in mind how they are currently. Certain things I'm sure can be edited though, like how large the top left image is and how large the buttons are (and I'm talking vertical and horizontal). Some things like the size of the advertising banners and sections can not be changed.

OK, so this thread died for like a month. Now that school's almost over though, I'm going to try to help get things back on track.

I think we left off with working on the colors for the skin, and we had a few suggestions. The inclusion of dark red/warm colors seemed to be a popular sentiment from what I could tell.

Here are some color scheme previews so far:









Any and all comments are welcome, seriously. The more people that voice their opinions every step of the way, the better. If any of these stand out for any reason, let us know what changes should be made and what looks alright as is so we can work from there to more detailed stuff.

i think it should have the MLG color scheme

I really like the first and last ones.

Is it cool if I just post my opinions on what's up every now and then? I don't really have any criticism to offer atm, none of those look too bad to me (except maybe the third, I don't really like the color combination there).

Werekill said:

The third and fourth ones are the best, but they each should have a few changes.

The third one should use the smash icons (which show if there are new posts) from the second one, and the fourth one should ditch the dark red part next to the smash icon in favor of a cooler color. Maybe the color from the third one?

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Dooonnnneee.





Too good. What do other people think? I'm starting to think that Back Room purple should be included somehow, lol.



Tried out Spire VII's scheme. I think it looks a'ight, maybe I could switch some colors around later too.



This one is an idea I wanted to try myself. Maybe someone can see some potential in it. Ignore the words at the top, I messed them up when I was adjusting the Contrast/Brightness...

Clownbot said:

Is it cool if I just post my opinions on what's up every now and then? I don't really have any criticism to offer atm, none of those look too bad to me (except maybe the third, I don't really like the color combination there).

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Yeah, definitely. Actually even if you don't like something I need you to let me know so we know what not to use. That goes for everyone. Thanks for the input, guys.

Also, considering the colors, we mentioned we wanted more Brawl imagery, so does that give anyone any specific scheme ideas? I know some people mentioned dark/wine red like the logo. Just wanted to re-mention that, in case anyone thought that was important to the colors we decide to use.

Hopefully more people will chime in as time goes on and this thread will get noticed on a larger scale.

charmander1065 said:

also, bowser is at the top of the screen, any ideas on if we should change it/what we would change it to?

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Yeah, that's going to come a bit later in the design phase. Right now we just want to settle on colors that will look good.

Pretty much, yeah.

I got destroyed by schoolwork at the end of last school year, so it got pushed to the backburner, and the other people I needed to help with this got really busy too.

I don't think I'll have much time in the future to dedicate to this, so... yeah. :C