Messages - colby67
61
The Pub / Re: Logo Madness
« on November 16th, 2012, 06:45 PM »
I did, but it vanished so it might be a bug there. Can't remember what I voted before lol,, but I like the current number 3. It just feels more balanced than the others, although there are little difference between them - save the font/style.
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Off-topic / Re: Happy birthday, Arantor!
« on October 4th, 2012, 10:15 PM »
Quote from Arantor on October 4th, 2012, 06:30 PM
That explains so much.
I would think so heh, though I am sure we are not thinking about the same thing.

So whats your ascendant then, Arantor? What sign is whats radiating off of you, though inside still being a libra..?
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Off-topic / Re: Happy birthday, Arantor!
« on October 4th, 2012, 06:29 PM »
Well, astrology is fascinating..but its rather useless IMHO if you only look at the sun-sign. People in same sign can be vastly different, depending on where their ascendant falls. Myself I am a Libra with a Sagittarius ascendant, which might make me seem possibly more like the latter than the former.
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Off-topic / Re: Happy birthday, Arantor!
« on October 3rd, 2012, 07:05 PM »
Quote from Kindred on October 2nd, 2012, 03:23 PM
well, hell...   Happy Birthday to you, Arantor...   another Libra - that explains things. :)
It does? :) Curious as to what, actually.
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The Pub / Re: Skin showdown
« on August 30th, 2012, 10:15 PM »
Quote from Nao on August 28th, 2012, 08:02 PM
Quote from Bloc on August 26th, 2012, 07:35 PM
Out of curiosity..which ideas would that be? I know you are protective of Wedge, but if you feel I *take" things from it, I'd like to be informed about that - so that I at least can *not* do that anymore lol. On the other side..if its some design bit you feel is whats been taken, it may not have been even conscious. I have actually been trying various stuff over the years, most of which didn't catch on, but nevertheless was interesting to explore.
I wouldn't say you took ideas from Wedge. And I probably took ideas from you, too, without realizing.
Perhaps Pete remembered the mention I made about your last ViennaBBS theme, with its use of Segoe UI everywhere, as I commented that my local install was a Segoe UI and I was planning to commit it, and then you came and made it look like I'd taken the idea from you ;)

Of course, there are not exactly so many 'usable' webfonts around... My choices are limited to Arial/Helvetica (the most commonly used font online, I believe), Tahoma (with a fallback for bold and italics), Verdana (not so fun these days), Segoe UI (with an Arial fallback), Calibri (with a fallback on the x-height compatible Source Sans Pro -- one of my favorite solutions actually), Georgia (not a good idea to use it across the entire UI...!), or embedding a lightweight one-size-fits-all webfont like Droid Sans, Open Sans or PT Sans (not so light though this one). But it's a bad idea to embed a font by default, it should be seen only on specific forums, so it's a no-go for me.
lol, I can see that might look.. a bit strange. As yes, there aren't many standard fonts to choose from, I never gone into so much detail about each font, because they render differently on OS'es, on different machines and finally at different screen sizes lol. Thats the nature of the web: you can't get exactly the same on every PC(without using images only) so (for me) serves no purpose to try. I just want a approximate font-type and leave it at that.
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Actually, when I made Curve it was far from boring lol. I was very excited
The padding work was what was exciting to developers at the time -- probably because of increasing resolution statistics.
Also -- round corners. But it was long before CSS3 came into play, so it wasn't exactly a fun implementation...!

You must not have had fun making it IE6 compatible! Or maybe other people did all the work on that..?
I've usually made themes the old fashion way, using background images, that surprisingly works well enough on IE6, so no, I haven't enjoyed working with IE6 - but then it wasn't so much to do either. When tableless stuff came into the themes, it changed things. But early, or first Curve version used tables anyway. The exception was that darn menu..it only worked with javascript, and still does.

Of course, today its quite another matter, i don't take IE6 into consideration at all now.
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You see more VB clones than SMF2 clones, but still SMF 2.0 is popular.
I have to admit to something strange though... If I see a lambda forum running a stock phpBB, that's okay. If I see it running a stock SMF2, it strikes me as odd. Probably because I see it as a rip-off of the main SMF website...
So it could either be fixed (in my mind) by using a different theme on sm.org than the default, or providing a much simpler skin for SMF2 and setting it to the default, while still providing Curve as an aside. But it's not a realistic solution...
Thing is, the more complex/convoluted a default theme, the more shocking it is when everyone starts running it.
It's one of the reasons I wanted to simplify Wine (and came up with Weaving), but it's even worse than that -- I'm actually wary (weary?) of seeing Weaving used on other sites...!
Heck, if anything, I should provide a huge box at install time, with the text "Please change the default colors! What do you want? Yellow? Green? Blue? Violet?"...
Letting go of ones creations, in the sense that they WILL be abused, copied, changed, improved when you offer them to others..thats just one of the things that goes along with it. :)
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Blue is a calm color, it gives off a sense of stability and strength that no other color can match.
SMF caught my attention because of Themis and Babylon. I don't think they were blue...? I'm not sure anymore. I think they were maroon or something. You wrote both, IIRC?
Only Themis. And it was green no doubt. I made other themes that were green too, but that was the first. Babylon was the default theme that came before "Core" theme, which I made for SMF 1.1. It was supposedly made by BabylonKing, a team member which did also some icons/smilies i think. I learned later though, that it was rather a collaboration between several team members, most notably Joseph.
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And...adding a sidebar isn't really that innovative, despite what you might think.
Adding the sidebar wasn't meant to be innovative.
Forcing it on the user, though, was rather innovative I'd say. And still providing a way to put it away -- by reducing the window width -- is even better.

I've never been fully happy with the contents of the sidebar, though. I'd like it to remain more consistent across pages.
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Portal mods have been indulging in them for years. While its certainly fresh to use them to attaching links and info related to your current whereabouts in the forum, its not new as such. I did that with the Simplicity theme for SMF 1.1, over 6 years ago. It was interesting then, but Simplicity theme was maybe too much at the time.
Never used it, but I still remember it fondly.
It was suggested in this topic that I could perhaps create some alternative themes or subthemes for Wedge...that might be interesting actually. A copy of Wedge would be needed for that to happen though.
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The Pub / Re: Skin showdown
« on August 30th, 2012, 07:29 PM »
Quote from Arantor on August 26th, 2012, 08:07 PM
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Anyhow, I'd like to know.
Nao talked about it more than once, but using boards for different kinds of content, some of the choices of fonts, those were things he felt you'd tried after we talked about them here. *shrug* Multiple discovery is at least as likely however.
Using boards as "blog" or "gallery" boars have been a peeve project of mine for many years, seen in many custom themes and also why I have stayed with the idea. Its not something i got here..but I did stray in assuming building extra functions for blog/gallery was a better option. You could say Wedge opened my eyes for going back to my earlier plans, but never did I take anything from here. As for fonts..how can you say anything can be "taken" by that? As Nao mentions, there are only so many fonts that most everyone has. I haven't used Segoe much, thought I try though, but I have used Verdana, Tahoma, Trebuchet, even Georgia all over. It was hardly a unique idea on Wedge only lol.
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(I see also you're as bad as I was about leaving/never returning.)
Yes, I did register again, to still read unread topics. While I regret driving the "Bloc madness" into some kind of Bloc=troll topic, I never stopped being interested in Wedge as a site. As I did NOT want more bad mouthing from either side, I made a new profile, but only used it to read topics on the progress of Wedge. When Nao reached out on Blocweb recently, I had for a time realized that I had been too harsh on the whole thing.(though, I did read all those pesky side-line comments by others on here, those are not forgotten, not by a long shot, but I will not adress any of them.)
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The key was to balance the two: being innovate and staying mainstream.
And that's the balance that too few seem to understand.
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this is not to boast, but just look around and check
Yes, and I'm not sure exactly what message that is giving. There has to be a reason why no-one else did it, and I'm not sure that the reason isn't because it wasn't the way to go.
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Whether that actually made it less than it could be, that if I had made, or someone else, had made a more vb-like theme..would SMF2 be MORE popular?
Yes, it would be more popular. There are way too many people that believe that if they can mimic the look of another site, they will get some rub-off popularity, c.f. all the people who want to emulate the look of Nairaland, all the people who use MyBB because it went quite far in trying to emulate vBulletin.
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So your argument about it not being fun is wrong I am afraid, as well as Curve being like the others out there..IMHO its quite distinct, for bad or for worse.
So I was wrong about it being fun for you. I simply figured that you as an artist would appreciate having the freedom to explore it how you saw fit, rather than making something that had quite diverse but limited constraints. It is quite distinct, and that can work against it.

But it also has a lot of similarities, because form follows function. The structure of the board, message and thread indexes follow the same structure as 1.1 and 1.0 and back. And I still believe that is because that is what is expected. You can do unique designs for unique sites but you have to return to the conventions for the base.

(If you're going to argue with what I'm saying, argue the points I'm making, not side points. I was wrong about it being fun. It's different, no argument, but the point I'm making is that its function follows all the others, and that there ARE a lot of design consistencies with other systems, like the fact there's still a lot of blue in it, even if it is accented with orange, it's still primarily blue.)
If I were american, i would say "chill, dude" or something like that...theres no point in arguing over this though, maybe I am not your typical artist type..but I do know that being artistic doesn't always mean "free to do whatever you want". That was my point, I was excited because I got work within constraints, but still be able to do something new and unique.It was fun, its still fun to make default themes lol. I think that goes without saying.
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Blue is a calm color, it gives off a sense of stability and strength that no other color can match. I think its just a color-choice made from that angle - not to suit every site as such.
Actually, I'd argue that some greens provide a sense of stability and strength (not to mention being pretty much the only choice that's consistent with positivity in just about every single culture out there) - but that blue is neutral, and in the base of the software you need that neutrality, though of course it can be changed and tweaked to a site's specific needs.
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And...adding a sidebar isn't really that innovative, despite what you might think
Where the hell did we say that adding a sidebar was innovative? Stop putting words in my mouth.
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Hence, people like changes - but in small doses and applied evenly.
I'd argue it was less about people liking change, but that in the interim, what was considered acceptable had changed around them, and thus what was considered desirable.
Of course. Thats how everything works ;D ..but one have to take certain risks to move forward. Taking too big a risk might not work, but smaller steps - that might go better. I can't provide with exact examples, but there have been times i changed a theme back to a earlier state(or TinyPortal) and then introduced smaller changes in a similar path without any protests. People have had time to adjust then.
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The Pub / Re: Skin showdown
« on August 26th, 2012, 07:35 PM »
Quote from Arantor on August 25th, 2012, 05:26 AM
Fair comment. Though I find it interesting to note that Bloc has actually been taking some of the ideas we proposed here... and it should also be noted that the default theme of every single forum software is bland. That's by design, and with one specific reason: it provides a structure for people to build upon.
Out of curiosity..which ideas would that be? I know you are protective of Wedge, but if you feel I *take" things from it, I'd like to be informed about that - so that I at least can *not* do that anymore lol. On the other side..if its some design bit you feel is whats been taken, it may not have been even conscious. I have actually been trying various stuff over the years, most of which didn't catch on, but nevertheless was interesting to explore.

Anyhow, I'd like to know.
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Let's take Bloc as a classic example. How enthusiastic do you think he was when designing Curve, as opposed to all the other creative themes he's done? Can you also imagine *ANY* of Bloc's newer themes being the default for ANY forum package, which by definition has to be a base, rather than the end product?
Actually, when I made Curve it was far from boring lol. I was very excited - but I did have to consider what everyone would like or not, I could not do just anything, thats true. The key was to balance the two: being innovate and staying mainstream. Thats not saying that default themes can't be a bit adventurous lol, after all..I haven't seen any forum that quite did what i did with Curve - this is not to boast, but just look around and check. You see more VB clones than SMF2 clones, but still SMF 2.0 is popular. Whether that actually made it less than it could be, that if I had made, or someone else, had made a more vb-like theme..would SMF2 be MORE popular? Hard to tell. But I know I enjoyed it much, and I did revisit that particular style both in later themes and it was also a development of earlier works.

So your argument about it not being fun is wrong I am afraid, as well as Curve being like the others out there..IMHO its quite distinct, for bad or for worse.
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Point of interest: why do all the forum software packages out there at present have a default theme based around the colour blue? Why do they do this, I wonder? Could it be that they have to be carefully neutral across all the different uses that their software will generate and that they have to remain neutral to allow users to customise for their specific site?
Blue is a calm color, it gives off a sense of stability and strength that no other color can match. I think its just a color-choice made from that angle - not to suit every site as such. Thats rather the job of the layout. The general forum layout hasn't changed that much..the typical spreadsheet approach is still here, its just in the nature of forums I guess. Facebook and Google are about blue color as well, and they don't need to suit different sites - they just have to look pleasing to everyone lol.

And...adding a sidebar isn't really that innovative, despite what you might think. Portal mods have been indulging in them for years. While its certainly fresh to use them to attaching links and info related to your current whereabouts in the forum, its not new as such. I did that with the Simplicity theme for SMF 1.1, over 6 years ago. It was interesting then, but Simplicity theme was maybe too much at the time. When I later did some similar themes for SMF2, they weren't that much downloaded. Hence, people like changes - but in small doses and applied evenly. <_<