I'm not a web designer by trade, so it sucks. But I wanted to show that maybe Phpbb boards aren't completely helpless? (I personally don't like the gradients and tiny text much.) I might work on this more later if I have time.
I use Stylebot for Chrome to customize the site for me.
Anyone care to contribute, choose a better palette, clean things up, make sub-forum view work, etc.? :)
Last edited by anonymous1337 on Jan 16, 2016 20:38, edited 2 times in total.
Seriously, that's all I had to do to make the site about 90% more readable. The post list looks way too crowded, IMO. Why have alternating row background colors AND top-and-bottom borders? The forum listing itself looks better without borders as well.
The logo makes the page more recognizable, which is fine. Thank You, board admin(s).
(However, imho i've got the feeling that the styles of the logo and the modern board do not fully fit together; but forget about that, just my amateurish feeling :-) )
Another small thing I noted: As it isn't possible to upload profile pictures (or, is it?) it would make sense to hide the dummy (question mark) pictures in the thread view.
//edit: maybe that needs more thoughts because e.g. the "Online" banner would have to be considered as well.
But, again, actually nothing of that is of real importance, just a few design notes/ideas.
For anyone curious, the main problem the internet eventually ran into with all of the gradients, shadows, outlines, etc. is that it's really hard to do consistently, and much of the time (especially on mobile devices), text is consumed on a flat (solid color) service, not a gradient or texture.
The modern web approach is to be very, very careful with textures and gradients because it's easy to overdo, and ultimately it's very difficult to do consistently throughout an entire site.
For example:
* The subforum and forum titles are gradients, but the list of posts isn't.
* Save draft, preview and submit buttons aren't gradients, but their box has a gradient and a box-shadow.
* Inconsistent use of outlines, or small text + outlines + similarly colored icons = difficult for your eyes to tell what they should be paying attention to.
* There are too many borders and sub-divisions on the FreeBASIC forum website, and they are discriminated either by background-color or border. These colors are mostly just various shades of gray. The too-similar-colorness of it all makes the website very hard to digest. Text colors are too similar to some background colors, making the site hard to react, and sections difficult to focus on.
It'd probably take me up to a day to get the FB site CSS in decent shape. More time to fix issues with individual browsers and devices. (Please stop using any IE < 10 if you are able.)
anonymous1337 wrote:For anyone curious, the main problem the internet eventually ran into with all of the gradients, shadows, outlines, etc. is that it's really hard to do consistently, and much of the time (especially on mobile devices), text is consumed on a flat (solid color) service, not a gradient or texture.
Hi anonymous1337, if you can do something about it. Not at all for me a problem of gradient. But I would prefere that the text zone would be more yellowish, or brighter in general. Grey background + black font is not so much readable in an overall grey space. Yellow grey, or yellowish + black would help more, or anything more warm and light. Just my feeling of course. By the way why the tt balise doesn't do fixed font?
anonymous1337 wrote:For anyone curious, the main problem the internet eventually ran into with all of the gradients, shadows, outlines, etc. is that it's really hard to do consistently, and much of the time (especially on mobile devices), text is consumed on a flat (solid color) service, not a gradient or texture.
Hi anonymous1337, if you can do something about it. Not at all for me a problem of gradient. But I would prefere that the text zone would be more yellowish, or brighter in general. Grey background + black font is not so much readable in an overall grey space. Yellow grey, or yellowish + black would help more, or anything more warm and light. Just my feeling of course. By the way why the tt balise doesn't do fixed font?
I think you're right about the black font being difficult to read when the background is gray. Coming back here after a couple weeks, I do find it distracting, even. Only option I can think of is making it white and maybe changing the interior colors a little more.
Colors like red, yellow or green need to be done more carefully because they have intrinsic meaning. Some people will like them, others will be highly irritated. Almost everyone seems fine with anything gray or blue.
By the way why the tt balise doesn't do fixed font?
Yeah, I actually think the default CSS is more readable at this point, still. I do think there's too much clutter and not enough contrast, but it's going to take me a little playing around to find a color scheme that works better for this forum... might even revert to something closer to the default, just with less borders and outlining :)
For me , maybe due to the darkness of the screen used in energy economy mode, the text zone is still too grey.
Second point. Would it be possible to get at least the edit box zone in white (or any test color)? It would allow us a comparison, and it's better to distinguish posting and editing.
Thanks anyway anonymous1337 for the improvements made on your name. Just a last thing, on OperaMini (phone browser) the code box is always expanded. This is a big issue since the phone screens are small, and memory potentially suffering from excess of text from a webpage (expanded codes can be extremely long).
