[Kuroya]

Okay, I am entirely nervous about posting this up since this is the first skin I've done all the way through and I know I usually have comment-worthy poor taste in design, especially when I'm designing a whole page rather than just parts.

That being said, I would like some feedback on the skin I have here. Yes, I'm aware it's monochrome, but I wanted it that way because I'm notoriously bad at picking colors I wanted this kind of... feel that the members and characters bring the color into the site with their templates and their accounts and their avvies and all that fun stuff.

The entire top banner is pure coding over an image, and the links will be filled in later since I just wanted to give a look at how it looks now (which this is how it will look on the admin/member end) so I can get feedback. For similar reasons, I've also decided not to mess with a cbox yet or get the member group colors done yet, but both of those will be coming eventually.

In addition to the hover banner area area, I also redid the thread list, board list, info center, and mini-profile.

So yes... please give me a bit of feedback on it? *wheeze* The people I've shown it to while working on it like a lot of it, but I'm uber paranoid of them not telling me it's actually really bad to spare my feelings, so some other feedback would be greatly appreciated as long as it's constructive.

[Nahara46]

Well I can't say much but it looks absolutely fab on phone. There were a few weird things like box spillage and pictures not loading, but pretty sure that's just my phone.

My only advice would be to tweak the pagination bar, it looks just a wee bit strange, I think the color is just real dark? But I love the header and thread list <3

[PEARL]

My opinion:

I like the board remodel. It is unique and different from what everyone else is using.

My suggestions:

1) Add more padding to top and bottom of category background.

2) Bold the category background text as opposed to the board name. The focal point should be the neat text the categories have but the eye is immediately drawn to the board name. Remove the bold text from board names.

3) Center align both the forum id and the subtext. It looks a little weird to have the subtext moving off to one side.

4) I did not know the forum banner was a hover table. Personally I like that it is just the table itself because it makes the entire section pop more.

I like it a lot though

[Wolf]

Hi! Before I critique anything, please understand that some, if not most, of this is opinion based or personal pet peeves. I'm also a crazy nitpicker. What I think is tacky might be perfectly fine in someone else's opinion. Please don't take any offense from this. It's not my intention.

Banner
Fonts with serifs are good for titles but annoying for blocks of text. So I'd recommend changing the text in the banner slider to verdana (the same font as the one in your board list).

Also, the box inside the slider looks slightly aligned to the right. Try centring it.

The navigation links seem a tad bit small. They are the same size the text in the slider. Personally, I don't like that. I'd prefer if they were bigger or if the top and bottom padding was more prominent.

Also, it'd be nice for the navigation boxes on both sides of the banner be aligned horizontally, instead of one on the top left and the other on the bottom right. (Unless that was what you were going for).

Give the navigation boxes the same width. Consistency is eye candy.

The feather in the banner graphic looks a bit blurred. It'd be best to grab a higher quality graphic.

Boards
Love the board and info centre remodel. They look simple yet unique! The space for the sub boards is a nice effect.

However, I don't like ridged borders. It reminds me too much of old 90's coding. With the board description padding-top that matches the left and right padding.

Keep the font consistent for the last post section (the "Kuroya last posted in FAQ" part). Make the links the same font as the rest of the text. Same thing with the " 3 Staff, 0 Members, 16 Guests have shown their wings today" part of the infocenter. Try using colours to distinguish between text and link.

Mini-profile
Looks awesome! Though I still don't like ridged borders.

Thread list
Nice and unique. However, I find that that each individual thread has too much height for a list. It would be tedious to have to do large amounts of scrolling. Try making the images and the font smaller.

Overall, I don't like the amount of greys used. I'd stick to around three shades of grey. But I understand that you were trying to make this monochrome.

Anyways, that's all I can say for now. I hope what I said makes sense. If you want me to elaborate on something, feel free to ask!
Good luck with your site!

[Kuroya]

Oops, life got a bit busy, so I've not had the chance (or, on occasion, motivation) to sit down and fiddle with the skin until now. So let's go through these.

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Nahara46 - I try to make most of my stuff phone-friendly since half the time I am on a phone myself. So I am really excited it is all phone-friendly.

And yeah I'll probably be fixing up the coloring. I had been trying to match the coloring of the links, but given that it really is too dark, I'll be updating that to lighter soonish.

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PEARL - Of course the board remodel is unique, it's something I created custom for the skin and actually designed before I did just about anything else.

I might go through and do add more padding, but actually, the padding is balanced - the category area has the same padding around it on all sides, and to add more top and bottom would be changing it. Not to mention that the white is one of the few things not classed for easy edits, so that'd be something I'd have to edit every time it appears, and to be frank, the work is not worth the payoff.

I actually took the time to check, and actually there is no bold anywhere in the board remodel. Not in the CSS. Not in the HTML. Nowhere. That's the default text. So I sorta kinda can't remove something that was never there in the first place.

While I agree that some of the aligns are weird, I don't think it'll work any other way. The board titles aligning left is something that can't change since it connects the boards directly to their subboards and draws attention to them. The category would then have to change alignment, but at the same time, having it on the opposite side connects the dual link areas and the "last posted" areas since as posts are added, the avatar sides will swap.

I had been debating adding a small (hover) to the banner, but with the knowledge that it's hard to realize it is a hover, I will definitely do that in the near future.

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Wolf - I perfectly understand pet peeves and that since I have many of my own, many of them obtained through a year of Literary Magazine that left me with very strange opinions on layouts (including a dislike for several popular designs that I see around).

Banner text changed. It's now a slightly smaller (since if I go too much smaller, things start getting weird and my eyesight is notoriously poor, so I really dislike skins that spam texts with small 10pt fonts) verdana. I actually hadn't realized that was verdana down in that list, I made the board list so long ago, so there's that to be considered.

I've wrestled with that dang slider for so long that it's not even funny. The only box that isn't actually aligned properly is the welcome one... and it happens to look the best. Since I adjusted the size of the nav links on the left (they're still actually bigger, but making them equal actually made them look smaller), I just pushed out the width of the slider a little and I think that might have fixed it. The padding and widths on that thing are hard to understand at times.

I tried adjusting the navigation v-align and actually, I didn't like it. The right looks wrong up at the top and the left doesn't flow quite as well at the bottom. Plus I like the feeling of having it slowly flow downhill from where it was with the site name and subtitle and then into the categories and boards.

Higher quality.... *laughs* That image I actually had to take from a scanned page since there wasn't an actual image of it. I don't think it's going to get any higher quality, sadly.

I actually do like borders when they're done well, so the borders aren't really going to go away (especially since they are so much of the site's design). The padding-top change really adds distance that I don't want between the name and the description, so that's not changing.

I personally happen to like different fonts on the last post area (minus the date, that part I would rather not have a different font, but I actually have no idea how to fix that), so I ended up just changing the font-family on the info-center only since I don't really care if it's immediately obvious those are links or not.

I actually adjusted the default thread list for a page so that it's half that of a normal amount of threads. So it's actually about even as it would be if it was a normal thread list, I think. I like the large images and font since it matches the board list, so they're not changing if I can avoid it.

And yeah it's a lot of gray, but like I said, I want the members to bring in the colors. Similarly, you need more than three colors to make most skins (especially one with this kind of layout), so it's kind of necessary unless I rip out the whole skin and restart and no. Nooooooo. It took me more than three months to get this far I'm not tossing it out just because it needs more color when I've not done member group colors yet or got the site open.

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Thank you guys for giving input though! It does mean a lot that you all gave me some hints and stuff on how to fix things when I've never skinned before, and it especially means a lot given that I got actual constructive criticism versus a "lovely" comment with no way to try to do much of anything to fix it.