Salsa

A Reaver

Salsa
Image

I don't see the difference.

Hehe, sorry about that, I just realized that I should have desaturated the image, not set the color-mode to grayscale, oops.^^;

Just a colour blindness joke.

lefarce

ozoneocean
At the moment what we're getting from you guys in this thread is like the modern Neocon version of Reganisim where the story everyone now believes about that era is different to what things were like to those of us who can still remember.

I still believe what I believed before. Granted I'm glad they changed that terrible background, my issue was always with the bright greens, which included the top and bottom tables.

Hey so I got this crazy idea in my head. I decided to lift a that light green from the Facebook banner, and substitute the current color of the top table with it to create a more unified design, which would also add to its pastel feel by removing an obstructive bright color.

Wow, I'm very surprised by what a big difference that makes. It looks 10 times better. Well done!
—
That change, along with a darker blue for the “top ten” etc text would be awesome, I think.
Would a relatively smaller change like that be possible?

Ironscarf
iously great idea, which is why I already mentioned it. Great minds think alike, fools seldom differ, but either way, it looks really well balanced and apologies for not mentioning other, non colour related issues.

I think I skipped that post where you presented that idea, so my apologies if it seems like I'm just cribbing on something you said.

Also I'm going to quote Salsa's post so it doesn't get lost a page back:

Salsa
Okay, I'm just going to address the second point first. Unless the color is coded right then and there (which if you are trying to be standards compliant you won't), it literally takes about 15 seconds to change the color of the text, or anything on the page. It shouldn't take that much time, and unless they have to have any changes approved, they should be able to change it, load it up into a web-browser and take a snap shot of it, just to show the community. I'll give that actually coming up with a good color scheme would take awhile, but this is changing one color in the current scheme.

As for the first point, yes some people like loud colors, some people like highly saturated complementary colors right up against each other. Most people don't. I understand that the yellow and the blue probably come for the logo, but the logo doesn't hurt people's eyes because the the two are not up against each other. In this layout they are, and that's a problem. The front page is going to be what a lot of people see, and it needs to be able to keep readers. As for the whole argument about me and three or four other people being in the minority, I'm looking at this from a good design stand point. Good design means that everything has to be easy to read. Pale blue on pale yellow a) doesn't look that good, b) the contrast is too low, especially for the smaller text sizes.

Salsa
Okay, I'm just going to address the second point first.

Youd've done better to have read her etire post and thenfollowed the advice and moved on to discussing other elements.

Salsa

skoolmunkee
1. How representative it is of the majority of users
2. Whether changing it will hold up production even longer

Unless the color is coded right then and there (which if you are trying to be standards compliant you won't), it literally takes about 15 seconds to change the color of the text, or anything on the page. It shouldn't take that much time, and unless they have to have any changes approved, they should be able to change it, load it up into a web-browser and take a snap shot of it, just to show the community. I'll give that actually coming up with a good color scheme would take awhile, but this is changing one color in the current scheme.

1.Changes have to be approved at different levels.

3. they have to fit in with different people “idea” of what is the right fit for the site.

4. Changing all the associated image design elements takes a while.

5. The main complain was about the scheme, not a single colour- although people do mention one of the colours used in the top and bottom bars. Colour schemes take a while to come up with.

6. Once it's actually changed, what's the guarantee that the same process won't repeat?

7. This isn't someone's personal site where they have the final say and these things that 15 seconds. This is a corporate site where everyone is on the clock and there is a hierarchy of management. Don't know whether you've ever worked in an environment like that before?

8. We've asked people to please move on for now and discuss other elements of the design.

Please read Skoolmunkee's considered and sensible post, take heed and then get to investigating the other elements of the design.

skoolmunkee
Okay, so I think this thread has gotten a little bit out of hand. The color hijack was useful in that it shows us basically that whatever color design DD goes with, an ability for users to change the colors is a must. I do think that Ozone is right in that in the old thread, most of the color complaints came before the change to the background color and after that there were fewer people dissatisfied with it.

I don't think the point about the colors should be ignored (or any other points brought up), but the designers do need to consider:

1. How representative it is of the majority of users
2. Whether changing it will hold up production even longer

1 is relatively simple, 4 or 5 people in one thread who feel strongly is something which should't be ignored, but we don't have a true idea of the majority of people's feelings. Statistically, people who disagree are more likely to say something than those who agree, and people who have no problem with it don't really have any incentive to say anything about it at any stage as they don't care whether it stays or goes. It's a bit dangerous to go making big changes based on statements from what may be a relatively small number of people, in the absence of any ability to determine more accurate numbers.

2. It's very likely that ANY colour scheme is going to make the same amount of people equally unhappy (and in fact some people are very unhappy about the current color scheme with grey and blue), so any time spent on changing it (vs. time that could be spent on developing the changability feature) might be wasted. Meanwhile the discussion gets hung up on one specific issue rather than on looking at other things which could benefit from feedback, like the “create” link thing that Oz mentioned. If the site gets implemented with a “create” button that a lot of people think is useless but didn't say anything about because they were too busy talking about the color, that hasn't helped anyone.


I think what Wowio has done is sensible- they already modified the background green based on previous input and they're aware some people don't like the color scheme for various reasons. They've promised the ability to change the colors in some way, which is the ONLY thing they could do which would make EVERYONE happy. However in the interest of getting a functional site up and running, which they've been wanting to do since October's failed server move and which is needed more and more as time goes on, they need to have some kind of starting color scheme. They could get stuck in an endless cycle of proposing designs and getting feedback, meanwhile the site isn't actually getting developed. I'd rather have the site being worked on.


Anyway, I think we get that the color is something people would like to see Kinh address somehow, but it's likely to be another 24 hours at least before we'll hear back from Wowio about anything. Can people have a look at some other things which appear on the designs and not spend so much time on the color?

ozone: Is point 2 a secret?

Hippie Van
ozone: Is point 2 a secret?

Lefarce stole it.

-I blame him for everything.

I say let's move on from the colour and talk about the more important issues; like, why isn't the duck and quail in the new design?

BffSatan
I say let's move on from the colour and talk about the more important issues; like, why isn't the duck and quail in the new design?

Here hear!
Or is it “Hear hear!”?

I dunno :(

There are a lotta logo designs with the duck and quail specifically included… I dunno what's doing on here. I'm personally pretty peeved at that unused art! :gem:

—————–
-BTW, not to be a massive hypocrite, but both Skool and I (mainly Skool with me agreeing) have brought that up about the text needing to be darker and we were assured that'd be addressed. Sorry for not posting that earlier.

Actually I really like lefarce's suggested color change. The sea-green vs the bright-green is an improvement.

The baby blue elements on the page will be mostly replaced with other images, so it won't look quite so samey in practice.


So what about some specifics of the design which we can see on the images?

1. The “create” link in the title links bar. This link is supposed to take you directly to the page where you create a comic. Wowio thinks this will make it as easy as possible for someone new to the site to just start posting their comic, but Oz thinks that a more general link to the control panel would be more useful to more users- and someone really new to the site would need to make an account anyway before they could create anything.

2. No link to the podcast in the title bar?

3. Favorites area - loss of page numbers, is that a big deal? Loss of rating and genre thumbnails? Dates in word format rather than numbers? Personally I'd like the page number back, don't care too much about the rating/genre, and think the word-date sorting is an improvement (not all countries present dates in the same way).

4. Condensing the 3 “tools” links for your comic down into one “edit” link?

5. There's a HELP link in the username area, what kind of stuff would be good to put there?

skoolmunkee
Actually I really like lefarce's suggested color change. The sea-green vs the bright-green is an improvement.

Definitely agree on the new banner color that's been suggested. However, the color scheme wasn't an issue for me anyway.

skoolmunkee
1. The “create” link in the title links bar. This link is supposed to take you directly to the page where you create a comic. Wowio thinks this will make it as easy as possible for someone new to the site to just start posting their comic, but Oz thinks that a more general link to the control panel would be more useful to more users- and someone really new to the site would need to make an account anyway before they could create anything.

Actually, yeah…the “create” button always seemed a little vague to me. Changing it instead to “Sign Up” seems more reasonable, and I think that's about what every other site does anyway. I can't really recall the whole signing up process, but I think there should be a comic-startup step during account creation, like right after the email confirmation. The link in the confirmation could take you straight to “creating a comic” page, in which case the user has the option to bypass the step and go straight to account settings (and of course, setting up a comic will always remain on the primary account page).

skoolmunkee
3. Favorites area - loss of page numbers, is that a big deal? Loss of rating and genre thumbnails? Dates in word format rather than numbers? Personally I'd like the page number back, don't care too much about the rating/genre, and think the word-date sorting is an improvement (not all countries present dates in the same way).

Comic pages in that section seem pretty essential. Most of the time I use that to determine how many updates I've missed for a strip I read. And some people love to double update, so that becomes readily obvious to me as well!

skoolmunkee
5. There's a HELP link in the username area, what kind of stuff would be good to put there?

Why it could provide another link to our lovely tutorials, of course! ;)

For the most part, this section should be practical help including detailed explanations for simply setting up one's comic. A “How to set up your comic” if you will. Personally, I think a step-by-step/topic tutorial is the best route (sort of like an FAQ, but you have topics in the header links rather than questions) because I generally despise FAQ versions. Anyway, the tutorial in its entirety can take the user through the basic steps of creating their comic with pictures and links to aid, and then delve into the more advanced areas of customization. Maybe even provide some shout-outs to our lovely template designers here (I feel like the average user would completely miss them unless they had issues and stumbled across them like I did!).

I might have more input later, but hopefully all of this is something you can work with. :)

lefarce
I think I skipped that post where you presented that idea, so my apologies if it seems like I'm just cribbing on something you said.

Not at all - I assumed you'd independently reached the same awesome conclusion, plus you made the effort of mocking it up, while I sat on my ass painting cute noses.

I already mentioned the rating/genre thing to Srhdt. I actually liked the fact that I could surf through the updates and right away be able to see the rating and genre of every comic. Now I have to roll my mouse over each and every icon, which is a major pain and as a result I browse less. Srhdt has explained to me however that the rating/genre feature was a major resource drain and that's why they removed it, so I really can't complain. If they ever figure out a way to get that working again though, I'd like to have it back, at least as an option to be turned on or off.

Also, the new PQ options are a big improvement. Overall I think the new version is a nice step up from where the site is right now.

El Cid
I actually liked the fact that I could surf through the updates and right away be able to see the rating and genre of every comic.

Agreed 100%!
The more info you have when browsing the beter. It's like looking at book title in a shop or DVD descriptions or description on Youtube or whatever.

The more info you have, the more likely you are to want to look more for things as well as investigate them! With less info up front you tend to be less likely to bother either searching or investigating the titles themselves.

I will be very annoyed if it doesn't come back with the new codebase. There's no reason that with a fresh start it can't be made smoother,- it ran perfectly ok for around 4 years or so on the older server on the old codebase with even more visitors at times.

ozoneocean
Here hear!
Or is it “Hear hear!”?

I've always been confused about that too.

ozone
There are a lotta logo designs with the duck and quail specifically included… I dunno what's doing on here. I'm personally pretty peeved at that unused art! :gem:

I actually complained about that last time the redesign came up, and was told they had some super-secret plan for the duck. So hopefully they go through with whatever the plan was(getting various members to design the duck, I think?). Another promise we have to hold them to, I suppose?

I like the changes. There needs to be more though. The drop down of myfavs/mycomic is super slow and the web comic management pages needs work. right now you move the page up and down one by one. its really archaic.

I like the changes except for one thing


How can it be Drunk duck without the Green Duck?

Huh.

It doesn't look like it'll effect me much, so I'm not bothered by the changes. I like the new layout. :D

Yeah hi. I was thinking about the PQ system and thought it would be a clever idea to introduce some sort of search feature. Something along the lines of “Show only PQ's from person X”. So if you guys could do that, then that would be great.

Incidentally, a forum search bar would also be nice.

The forum designs we've seen have a search function. :]


Please put new suggestions in the suggestions foruuuuuuuuum or they will get loooooooost

skoolmunkee
The forum designs we've seen have a search function. :]

If you're talking about the search bar, located at the top of the site, then that only searches users and comics; not the forum.

However, I just saw a forum search bar in the newest Redesign blog (#4), so that made me happy.

I'll throw in the PQ sorting idea into the suggestion thing at some point >.>

Product Placement

skoolmunkee
The forum designs we've seen have a search function. :]

If you're talking about the search bar, located at the top of the site, then that only searches users and comics; not the forum.

However, I just saw a forum search bar in the newest Redesign blog (#4), so that made me happy.

Yes, by “we've” I meant me and Oz, we've seen more of the redesigns than has been posted publicly. So I was trying to answer your question, not be snarky about something that was there you missed.

Someone
…uploaded comics will be re-sampled to a standard .png format.

from the latest (March 4th) Redesign Blog entry has me slightly concerned: not really looking forward to having my pristine, super-optimized 8-bit lossless pngs resampled with lossy compression, which I'm guessing is what's going to happen. I hope I am mistaken! Resampling is…really not ideal from the creator's standpoint. And I guess animated .gifs won't be supported?

Yeah, I stopped using .pngs on color images when I realized that it darkened all my colors obscuring all the effects I was going for.

I did use it for B&Ws for a while until I realized just how ugly it made the lines look.

smbhax

Someone
…uploaded comics will be re-sampled to a standard .png format.

from the latest (March 4th) Redesign Blog entry has me slightly concerned: not really looking forward to having my pristine, super-optimized 8-bit lossless pngs resampled with lossy compression, which I'm guessing is what's going to happen. I hope I am mistaken! Resampling is…really not ideal from the creator's standpoint. And I guess animated .gifs won't be supported?

It's meant to be jpg, not png. -_-
Dunno what went wrong there.

And it is ONLY meant to happen when images are above a certain file size. 350KB was mooted.
If the images are below that then there will be NO changes.

I will have to bring this up again with Kinh, but we did discuss all that pretty thoroughly.

So all images above 350kb are converted to jpg's?
I don't really see why this is necessary.
Personally it doesn't suit me; most of my comics are often larger than 350kb, and, due to my style, when exported as jpg's are both horrendous to look at and twice the size.
At least I'll have a main site to fall back onto, but I'm probably not the only person on this boat.

Also, I love that in the new forum design, 1337 master is the most recent poster in every thread.

BffSatan
So all images above 350kb are converted to jpg's?
I don't really see why this is necessary.
Personally it doesn't suit me; most of my comics are often larger than 350kb, and, due to my style, when exported as jpg's are both horrendous to look at and twice the size.
At least I'll have a main site to fall back onto, but I'm probably not the only person on this boat.

As Kinh says in his post- things are balanced out to also make viewing the site smoother on mobile devices.
But a significant issue is also server space for thie site. Jpg provides the best combination of quality/file size/and compression for complicated images of any format.


As a professional graphic designer I know very well how to use all image formats that are commonly used on the web, what formats are best for what sort of artwork and how to get the best quality, file sizes, and compression in whatever I use * - for print as well. But that's because it's part of my job, 99.99% of people out there don't have that sort of experience, so stuff like this server processing is there to take the pain out and make things easier for them, rather than simply providing a cut-off and not letting people upload the work if it's oversize.

-I was easily able to get your latest page under 350kb as a jpeg with no visible loss of quality.
I checked out both versions on my 21UX Cintiq monitor as well as my 32 inch Samsung LED monitor and both were identical.
What program are you using to save your file formats?
-often this is the issue, not the formats themselves.
-I'm working in Photoshop CS4.

————–
This is what your unmodded full size art looks like:



This is what the compressed jpg format looks like:



This is what the unmodded art is like at 300% of its size:



This is what the compressed art is like blown up to 300%:



-You can only notice the artefacts when the art is enlarged bigger than what you'd actually see it at on the web.
-All these are saved here as PNGs so that no new artifacts were added.

I've already had this argument with Ozone (and I think back then it was 250 or 300kb?) so I'm going to wait and see how well the images shrunken down. Only 23 of my 113 completed pages (including the ones not uploaded yet) fall above 350k so the only one I'm worried about is an upcoming doublespread.

The sad thing is that this might hit pretty hard any comics that use a “one chapter per looong scroooling page” format.

(I just hope the redesign will do something nice for chapter-based comics because I don't want people to start each new chapter from the last page spoilerama).

People who end up with large-size png files may want to try http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pngcrush PNGCrush, which is a free program to find the best possible optimization for a png file without any visible quality difference. I haven't used it myself but I consistently hear good things.

ozoneocean
As Kinh says in his post- things are balanced out to also make viewing the site smoother on mobile devices.

Does this mean we might see a mobile version of the site sometime in the future? That would be nice. DD is a bit of a pain on my ipood.


Also: MORE with the horrible lack of contrast! Can't we at least have a proper black text for the forums?
Mes pauvres yeux! Why does Wowio want me to go blind? : (