Design Work

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Keir
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Design Work

Post by Keir »

So I saw in another thread that you guys have had people offering to help with updating things and they seem to flake and disappear so I would like to put myself forward to help out.

I have the free time in order to help so that's not an issue.

I had a quick play around today and put something together for a couple of pages. I've obviously not taken in to account any changes the Admins want to make structurally or what they want added or removed or anything (as I have no idea what they want) so I've mostly duplicated what's already on those pages.

Anyway, happy to help if you're looking for some!

Edit: I didn't go to the trouble of doing *all* of the forums/categories as I figured that would be a bit OTT :D
Edit 2: I just noticed the "Yahoo [Bot]" hasn't wrapped properly. 8-)

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Re: Design Work

Post by awesomeguy »

Great job! Is this just an image or an actual website? PM the source code to Andy and use this as BA v3. Also, make a mobile version. The current BA is horrible for phones. The logo also should kind of be the Windows colors, like this logo AlphaBeta made sometime ago. For a guest, keep the current layout. For someone logged in, make the "Latest Forum Topics" thing bigger.
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Lukas Marsik
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Re: Design Work

Post by Lukas Marsik »

Gotta say this looks amazing, in case it is a proper phpBB theme, it would be awesome if the staff could migrate to it in the near future.

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Re: Design Work

Post by computebrute »

Although I do realize this is purely conceptual, this design honestly doesn't "feel like" Betaarchive. The "recent posts" list should take up more space to see more topics and the frontmatter text is too bland. In your theme, it would be the first thing everyone sees when they visit the page, but in the current design, you'd have to look for it. Think of this way: your instinct when opening a text would be to read the immediate words it shows. But every time you open this page, you'd instinctively read "With over 26TB in..." because it is just so obvious and I would personally find this annoying. It all ties in with the psychology. Now what I'm saying here might sound completely outlandish, but I hope it makes at least a little sense to you, with respect.
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Keir
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Re: Design Work

Post by Keir »

Thank's for the feedback!
Currently it's just an image (no point coding *anything* up until it's been designed really to save time ^^
computebrute wrote:Although I do realize this is purely conceptual, this design honestly doesn't "feel like" Betaarchive. The "recent posts" list should take up more space to see more topics and the frontmatter text is too bland. In your theme, it would be the first thing everyone sees when they visit the page, but in the current design, you'd have to look for it. Think of this way: your instinct when opening a text would be to read the immediate words it shows. But every time you open this page, you'd instinctively read "With over 26TB in..." because it is just so obvious and I would personally find this annoying. It all ties in with the psychology. Now what I'm saying here might sound completely outlandish, but I hope it makes at least a little sense to you, with respect.
Appreciate the feedback!
Yeah, I just grabbed everything from the current site as-is really so some things would/should be changed and such but I just thought of it as a concept / starting idea really.

The front page definitely needs some love though for sure in terms of the content.

Thanks!

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Re: Design Work

Post by Overdoze »

I think it looks rather nice. This site could certainly use a visual overhaul, and going in this sleek, modern direction is the right way imho.
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Re: Design Work

Post by Keir »

Overdoze wrote:I think it looks rather nice. This site could certainly use a visual overhaul, and going in this sleek, modern direction is the right way imho.
Thanks!
I think what puts some members off is that because the current look has been active for so long, that *any* change will not feel like BetaArchive but it's just a case of getting used to any change, and it never takes long.
Some people just don't like change, which is fine, but nothing stays the same forever!


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Re: Design Work

Post by Battler »

- Keir: The only problem I have with your design is that it seems to be fixed width. Making the page take the entire screen width would be better, IMHO.
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Re: Design Work

Post by Keir »

Battler wrote:- Keir: The only problem I have with your design is that it seems to be fixed width. Making the page take the entire screen width would be better, IMHO.
A valid point! Overall it would be easy to translate into a responsive design at the time of coding.
That said, I wouldn't make it 100% regardless. Personally I would make it responsive up to a point (that point could be like 1400-1600 pixels wide, but i wouldn't make it 100% beyond that for example.
On my 2560 display, 100% width can be a pain to view so I would suggest making it responsive from phone size up to say around the 1400-1600 mark.
That way for people on average sized displays, it'll look fine, and be 100% wide, or near to, and for those on big displays, you won't have that added hassle of trying to follow a row across the page to see who last posted in a thread for example.

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Re: Design Work

Post by Keir »

I'm also working on a slightly reworked version that might make it feel a bit more "BetaArchive" (specifically the top bar) and making the homepage less WALL-OF-TEXT (and a wider Latest Posts bit)

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Re: Design Work

Post by Andy »

Before you waste any further time on this, we already have a template which works well for this site, excpet for it not being suitable for mobile devices. We are not looking to change the look and feel of the site. The main issue is the phpBB template system which was changed between v3 and v3.1. This is pretty much the only thing stopping us from upgrading the forum to the latest version and at the same time making it compatible with mobile devices.

In any case, you're completely new to the site. We don't know you, we have no trust in you, and we are certainly not going to go through the whole procedure again where someone agrees to help us and ultimately ends up not doing so. This has happened on no less than 6 occasions to date, and this is why we do not ask nor accept help anymore.

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Re: Design Work

Post by Keir »

Andy wrote:Before you waste any further time on this, we already have a template which works well for this site, excpet for it not being suitable for mobile devices. We are not looking to change the look and feel of the site. The main issue is the phpBB template system which was changed between v3 and v3.1. This is pretty much the only thing stopping us from upgrading the forum to the latest version and at the same time making it compatible with mobile devices.

In any case, you're completely new to the site. We don't know you, we have no trust in you, and we are certainly not going to go through the whole procedure again where someone agrees to help us and ultimately ends up not doing so. This has happened on no less than 6 occasions to date, and this is why we do not ask nor accept help anymore.
Ahh no worries!
I might code it up into a template and stick on one of those sites for sale, so no time wasted!

Cheers!

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Re: Design Work

Post by LoneCrusader »

Andy wrote:...We are not looking to change the look and feel of the site...
+1

No offense meant to the OP of course. But if it's not broken, don't fix it. I know over at MSFN there's always a raft of errors, annoyances, and broken things every single time the Forum Software gets updated.
Invision Power Board is TRASH. phpBB like here for the win.
All you people who keep going on about "updates" need to be careful what you wish for.

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Re: Design Work

Post by mrpijey »

Keir, thanks for wanting to help. It's always nice to see people that wants to improve the community and help out in other ways than use up our bandwidth :). Personally I think your ideas are interesting, albeit a bit dark and gloomy for our taste. We are looking for a whole new layout (while trying to keep the current design and color scheme for now) with a website and where the forum is just a part of it, and not a central part of the whole. Of course if you still want to help out you are welcome, but remember that many have tried and all have failed in the past. And as Andy pointed out, you're new here and we don't know your background in web design or your interest in BetaArchive. We just need to get to know you better before we can include you in our plans, but that doesn't mean you can't help out. I suggest you continue with your work (for BA or for any other purpose you see fit) and keep us updated. Who knows, you may be on to something as well.

Personally I think however we should try to stick with a CMS of sorts (Wordpress etc) to make it easier to add content and control it all better as we have little time to sit and handcode everything manually endlessly. So if any efforts are to be made towards helping out with a new layout etc it should be in that direction, and not a custom made page where only one person knows how to update it and where there's little to no chance to enhance it with modern features.
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Re: Design Work

Post by Ludacris »

LoneCrusader wrote:
Andy wrote:...We are not looking to change the look and feel of the site...
+1

No offense meant to the OP of course. But if it's not broken, don't fix it. I know over at MSFN there's always a raft of errors, annoyances, and broken things every single time the Forum Software gets updated.
Invision Power Board is TRASH. phpBB like here for the win.
All you people who keep going on about "updates" need to be careful what you wish for.
https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerabilit ... Phpbb.html

phpBB for the win? Yeah more like for the win of hackers.
Also: Don't fix what's broken - phpBB 3.0 is pretty broken if you ask me. Also (sorry Andy and mrpijey, no offense to you) the websites Design is god damn outdated, it looks like it's stuck in the Windows Longhorn Development - don't get me wrong, I loved this design somewhat like 7 years ago when BAv2 came out but its a damn long time since then and many things have changed since then. Now we don't have glass borders any more.

So while keeping the basic color scheme, I would suggest to adjust it a bit to fit modern design trends more and then adapt a modern design similar to what the OP has shown. I would for example get rid of the icons at the top or at least try to find icons that fit togther, those look like 7 different icon sets.

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Re: Design Work

Post by Andy »

I prefer functionality over looks. phpBB has never caused us any issues, and it's not the only software in the world to suffer vulnerabilities by any means, so you can't use that as an excuse at all. phpBB 3.1 will fix many issues present in 3.0 I agree, but that's not an option yet.

And as we say, if it's not broken, don't fix it, so with regards to the design that's exactly what we are going to do. We already have a CSS version of the template which looks identical without using tables and images, I just don't have the time to implement it. And thanks to the changes in phpBB's templating system in 3.1, that makes developing for it much more difficult with regards to this template as well, so that would need either a full redesign or someone to port it over to the new template system.

The site may feel dated, but that's our look. For example just because a classic car looks dated doesn't mean it isn't still beautiful and functional. As long as the site works on all devices, I don't see why looks matter.

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Re: Design Work

Post by LoneCrusader »

Ludacris wrote: https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerabilit ... Phpbb.html

phpBB for the win? Yeah more like for the win of hackers.
Rubbish. So it has some vulnerabilities? What software doesn't? And for that matter, things such as this are entirely abstract until someone actually attempts an exploit.
Ludacris wrote: Also: Don't fix what's broken - phpBB 3.0 is pretty broken if you ask me. Also (sorry Andy and mrpijey, no offense to you) the websites Design is god damn outdated, it looks like it's stuck in the Windows Longhorn Development - don't get me wrong, I loved this design somewhat like 7 years ago when BAv2 came out but its a damn long time since then and many things have changed since then. Now we don't have glass borders any more.

So while keeping the basic color scheme, I would suggest to adjust it a bit to fit modern design trends more and then adapt a modern design similar to what the OP has shown. I would for example get rid of the icons at the top or at least try to find icons that fit togther, those look like 7 different icon sets.
No thank you, you can keep your "modern" garbage. No thank you to the nasty eyesore-white-space-everywhere-nondescript-flat-"metrotard"-touch-screen-looks-like-it's-for-preschoolers trash. Just because it's the newest look pushed by Microsoft doesn't make it better.
Andy wrote:I prefer functionality over looks. phpBB has never caused us any issues, and it's not the only software in the world to suffer vulnerabilities by any means, so you can't use that as an excuse at all. phpBB 3.1 will fix many issues present in 3.0 I agree, but that's not an option yet.

And as we say, if it's not broken, don't fix it, so with regards to the design that's exactly what we are going to do. We already have a CSS version of the template which looks identical without using tables and images, I just don't have the time to implement it. And thanks to the changes in phpBB's templating system in 3.1, that makes developing for it much more difficult with regards to this template as well, so that would need either a full redesign or someone to port it over to the new template system.

The site may feel dated, but that's our look. For example just because a classic car looks dated doesn't mean it isn't still beautiful and functional. As long as the site works on all devices, I don't see why looks matter.
+1 again. Couldn't have said it better.

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Re: Design Work

Post by hounsell »

Andy wrote:The site may feel dated, but that's our look. For example just because a classic car looks dated doesn't mean it isn't still beautiful and functional.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to most of your post, but this is pushing it a bit. Just because a car is old, does not make it a classic. BA's look is old, not classic.
LoneCrusader wrote:Rubbish. So it has some vulnerabilities? What software doesn't? And for that matter, things such as this are entirely abstract until someone actually attempts an exploit.
I'm just quoting this because I find it hilarious that someone actually came up with this. The whole notion of "security isn't something you need to consider until you're already compromised" is quite conceivably the worst thing the 90s gave to the tech industry.
LoneCrusader wrote:No thank you, you can keep your "modern" garbage. No thank you to the nasty eyesore-white-space-everywhere-nondescript-flat-"metrotard"-touch-screen-looks-like-it's-for-preschoolers trash. Just because it's the newest look pushed by Microsoft doesn't make it better.
You've utterly skewered that viewpoint no-one was arguing in favour of. For starters, Microsoft's "Modern" is no longer modern, it's rather dated itself. But when people were talking about modern, they were arguing in favour of modern design principles, such as responsive design (ie, it adapts to different screen sizes) and is ready for High-DPI screens. And yeh, it's going to look different to some 90s website optimised for dial-up.

I mean, hell, part of Daniel's post that you quoted was simply arguing for a more consistent design. Are you really opposed to consistency? Do I even want an answer to that question?

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Re: Design Work

Post by James »

LoneCrusader wrote:
Ludacris wrote: Also: Don't fix what's broken - phpBB 3.0 is pretty broken if you ask me. Also (sorry Andy and mrpijey, no offense to you) the websites Design is god damn outdated, it looks like it's stuck in the Windows Longhorn Development - don't get me wrong, I loved this design somewhat like 7 years ago when BAv2 came out but its a damn long time since then and many things have changed since then. Now we don't have glass borders any more.

So while keeping the basic color scheme, I would suggest to adjust it a bit to fit modern design trends more and then adapt a modern design similar to what the OP has shown. I would for example get rid of the icons at the top or at least try to find icons that fit togther, those look like 7 different icon sets.
No thank you, you can keep your "modern" garbage. No thank you to the nasty eyesore-white-space-everywhere-nondescript-flat-"metrotard"-touch-screen-looks-like-it's-for-preschoolers trash. Just because it's the newest look pushed by Microsoft doesn't make it better.
Okay, mate. You need to chill out. Next time you want to criticize something, maybe be a little more mature about it.

There's a difference between expressing your opinion and flamebaiting, which you're treading awfully close to with your use of words like metrotard.

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Re: Design Work

Post by computebrute »

James, though I do agree with you that he has to be mature about how he expresses himself, everyone has an opinion. Rule of thumb is, take in any opinion/saying with a grain of salt. If he wants to say "Metrotard", let him say it. But beware that simple words really shouldn't affect anyone.

Just my two cents here.
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Re: Design Work

Post by Darkstar »

Oh god please don't make this forum look like Discourse or something. That sh*t is utterly unusable.

There's nothing wrong with this forum (other than that it needs a version update badly).

High-DPI? Works just fine, just increase font-size.
Responsive design? I don't change my desktop monitor on the fly that often, so why would I want that?
...in fact, I think a small and simple forum like phpbb is actualy more responsive because it has faster load times than all this "responsive design" JavaScript stuff. A single .js-file for these designs is bigger than a whole forum page from phpbb.

And I absolutely hate websites that force that whole "touch UI" thing on everyone even if they know that I'm not using a tablet to access the site. I mean things like 1cm of spacing between every 2 elements on a site and stuff like that. I have a mouse, I can aim :)

so please, whatever you'll do to the forum, at least keep the "spirit" similar to how it's now. It doesn't have to be phpbb if something else work s better, but jumping on every "reactive design" bandwagon just brings the same problems with it, in 3 years nobody knows how to hack your "outdated reactive javascript script conglomerate" anymore.

...just my 2 cents ;-)

P.S.: What is a "metrotard"? All I can find on Google has to do with subways, which I don't think is the correct context here...
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Re: Design Work

Post by computebrute »

Darkstar wrote:
...just my 2 cents ;-)

P.S.: What is a "metrotard"? All I can find on Google has to do with subways, which I don't think is the correct context here...
Offtopic Comment
I'm glad we're sharing our "two cents" here :cool: . Although "Metrotard" has no real meaning, it could probably imply that he thinks the metro theme look stupid, going off on an assumption here...
Anyway, back on topic. As mentioned before, don't fix something that works. Even when it comes time to upgrade, I suggest we adapt the current theme to work with a newer version of PHPbb which I believe Andy has already done. This seems like the most logical step in the foreseeable future.
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Re: Design Work

Post by hounsell »

Darkstar wrote:...in fact, I think a small and simple forum like phpbb is actualy more responsive because it has faster load times than all this "responsive design" JavaScript stuff. A single .js-file for these designs is bigger than a whole forum page from phpbb.
That's funny, considering any remotely competent responsive design will be done entirely in CSS with media queries.

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Re: Design Work

Post by Keir »

You can do a lot more with CSS these days that you used to have to do with images such as shadows and gradients and such, which removes the need to load so many images.


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Re: Design Work

Post by Darkstar »

Keir wrote:You can do a lot more with CSS these days that you used to have to do with images such as shadows and gradients and such, which removes the need to load so many images.


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I was talking about JavaScript files, not images. A "minified" version of Angular.js, for example, is over 160kb of JavaScript, which alone, according to my browser, is maybe 5x the size the complete "new posts" page of the forum as it stands today, including all images and CSS files. This does not even factor in the overhead for parsing/executing all that JavaScript.
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