Love it? Hate it?

[Stratadrake]

Okay guys, what do you think of the site's new layout? You know, the new color scheme, the new features, the overall new arrangement. Pick your vote, and back it up with a short explanation why.

[SpiritWolf77]

I like it. My only complaint so far is the color scheme. With such a dark background, it's hard to see some of the black and dark blue links and headers. I would either lighten the text to make it reversed out text or lighten the background slightly.

[Touzoku-joou]

Well, I do like the new mainsite layout, but I miss the old forums. I liked the quick reply option, and the old emotes. :/

I'd probably be able to enjoy the site more if it wasn't so fregging slow, though. :<

[unfocused]

i hate the colors. fucking hate them. its not even on the grey scale, its mixed with purple or something. the first moment i saw the new color scheme i decided to make those different palettes of better examples i showed in the SH forum. but what do you know, most of the sitehelpers go and choose [i]this[/i] color scheme... one most of us dont like at all. thankfully, denis agreed to allow members be able to choose mulitiple layouts. but when? maybe in a few months...

anyone who hates the colors has to blame fallen. she's the one who wanted this color scheme and fought me from changing it to a lighter, more professional look. boo on her, she doesnt know what she's talking about. she moaned on and on about how lighter colors suck for a picture and hates them, when, at the time, WE WERE USING THE WHITE COLOR SCHEME. she loses hard.

these were just two of the examples i made to counter these dirty colors we have to look at now... both of which i think would have gotten less angry members emailing denis all day long.

[img]http://img100.imageshack.us/img100/7712/faclightgraphic0ll.png[/img]

[img]http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y112/unfocused/FACgrayblue.png[/img]

as for the new features, i praise denis for his hard work and creativeness and adding them. the site will become faster, no worries, thats just a problem for now, not in the long run.
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"edit : i luv james" - Layzcarter

[Touzoku-joou]

Ooh, yeah, I do like that white one better. Really, it doesn't matter to me, but I think the text on the mainpage should be made lighter (to a light gray, perhaps).

I'm still not very fond of the image, though. I preferred just the Pheral and Sam. If we're going to have fanart, I'd like for it to look more professional. Until then... justpheralplz.

[unfocused]

thnx

also.. what do you think of the Writers Corner logo?
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"edit : i luv james" - Layzcarter

[Stratadrake]

Multiple skins would be very nice. Only problem, it might require different thumbnails generated for each.

[Moonlightelf]

I say that i liked old one better... The old one made me happy eventought i was sad or bored with its cheering blue and light blue. Now, when i come here with those same feelings, they remain same or even drop bit more since this looks so unhappy now. But whatever.. your decisions.

[fallenangel]

Well I was going to post in the other bitching thread, but since James mentioned me here, I guess I'll post here instead.


Bottom line is...if you don't like this layout...or prefer the old one...you know nothing about design. Period. You don't know how to matte a painting. Or hang a gallery show. Or display art in a professional manner. I do. And you can think I don't or whine that you liked the blue and white, but when it comes down to it, I know better than you do.

Light grey CAN be a perfectly fine matte for a piece of work. In certain situations. It depends on the tones of the picture whether it will be appropriate. The problem is for everything else, it looks god awful. It will wash out half the greyscale pictures and mess with the tones of the color ones. Except for the minority that it is appropriate for.

Dark tones, on the other hand, are appropriate or suitable 95% of the time. The only time they mess with a picture is if it is an extremely dark image, in which case it will be overwhelmingly dark, but a light matte would be too high contrast and overwhelm any subtle lights anyway. In which case I'd matte it with a neutral charcoal tone, but that tends to just be rather ugly as a site background.

The light grey layout does not look any more professional, it just looks lighter. Light grey would make most of my art, being greyscale, washed out. Especially the lighter pencil work like Taime. Of the art I have framed at the moment, all are matted with either black or dark charcoal and are in 1 or 2" black frames. 2" matte borders.

There is very little that will look bad on dark neutral, but there's a lot that will look bad, or below its potential, on light neutral. Anything you can matte on white you can matte on black just as well. The opposite is not true.

As for the blue, the mere fact you want a COLOR background speaks volumes. Mostly "don't listen to me". Color, especially as saturated a color as that blue, is one step below picking bright red, and not a very big step because the effect is the same. Color will [i]always[/i] mess with color. There's a reason the background to photoshop is mid level grey and not blue. And why when a person with blue eyes wears a blue shirt, their eyes stand out more. Our eyes register color relative to what colors are around it. Putting a color image on blue will make the colors read completely wrong. Greyscale work could be displayed on it, but not very pleasantly.


And as for white...there's a reason you should NEVER paint on a white background if you plan to add a background to the image. Color reads completely different on white than on color or tone. If you draw a character on white then add a background, the colors can and probably will be completely different than you thought. Too light, too dark, not the right hue. Taking an image and putting it on a white or extremely light background has the same effect, the colors read differently than they actually are.


So. You see. The point is to [b]display your art in the best manner possible[/b]. Not to look happy. The white and blue looked like a default template anyway.


And just to emphasize, that light grey is [i]god awful[/i] for art. Never in a million years would you see respectable art displayed on such a layout. It looks like a computer tech site. Sure, it's more professional for some business site, but not art.
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"I care about people as much as I care about lawn furniture" - Dexter/Michael C. Hall

[unfocused]

i wont argue that dark nuetrals make things look better, because i like how my stuff looks now. even so, its not too far from what it looked like with the white/blue colors we had before. to me, you're sacrificing too much and getting too little.

the colors we have now or just too dirty. looks like a whole pile of square dark crap. the 3 or 4 grey-like colors on the mainsite just werent thought out properly on how to mix them. you have 'very dark' jump to 'dark', and then 'dark' jumps to 'light grey'. that doesnt look good. and though its not really a light grey, it looks it because of how dark the background is. i even made an example of a dark layout to, only trying to mix the colors better! still, you rejected that.

i dont recall anyone arguing when we got the white/blue colors, atleast not half as bad as this. so i say listen to the people who make up the site. i guess the fight is pictures looking slightly better vs. the whole site looking slightly better.

and really, so far it looks like someones personal webpage as opposed to a large art community.

[fallenangel]

Anyone....anyone who liked the white background more than this should be banned from the site because anyone with such poor design sense can't possibly make art worth looking at. White...with saturated blue accents. Jesus.

[b]It's not the color that does or does not make a site look professional[/b]. It can make it look unprofessional, but not professional. It's the text, layout, and logo that do that.

If it looks unprofessional now, it's because the art is subpar, the logo is in an immature style, and the layout could be made with a template.

By its nature, FAC will always be immature because it will always be full of half assed inuyasha doodles. No way to hide that. But it should at least look better than a childish all white with bright blue accents. As it is now, it's basically monochrome and blends fine.

This is not a commercial site
It's not an entertainment site (porn, Launch, MTV style...)
It's not a news site

It doesn't have to make a clear, inviting environment that makes people want to buy or have eye grabbing colors to attract attention or be boring and generic to communicate information in a concise manner. It has to display art and not be garish. That's it.

If you want it to look pro, check out Epilogue, make a clear logo, and ditch the template layout and images on the front page unless they're the 10 best pictures of all time. But...it's not a pro site. It's a display for kiddie artwork. It just shouldn't look lazy, which it doesn't anymore.
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"I care about people as much as I care about lawn furniture" - Dexter/Michael C. Hall

[unfocused]

people arent complaining about it looking unprofessional, thats just me. people are complaining about it looking butt ugly, which it is.

and its just wrong to say that everyone needs to be banned because they just dont agree with you and your beliefs in colors+art. [b]this is fac, like you keep saying... fac is for crappy halfassed inuyasha doodles. so who gives a fuck about how the shit looks on what shit background you have?[/b]

i'd rather have something that compliments my art with nice navigation and easiness on the eyes, not something that at first sight, makes me want to click the back button. sure, it will make some drawings look better..... but to who? we havent gotten any emails from members saying "oh damn my art looks so good because of the dark colors!!!"

we actually have gotten plenty of the exact opposite :/

[fallenangel]

Hm, I should put my "There's a line of good taste and you just fuckin' snorted it" sig back then, shouldn't I?

I don't think it's wrong at all. Because I'm right. White with blue accents is just terrible. That's not just my opinion, that's a color theory fact.

[quote]we actually have gotten plenty of the exact opposite :/[/quote]

From 12-year-olds that, as I said, have no idea what they're talking about. If they want the white back, that's an instant indicator that they shouldn't be listened to because [b]it wasn't an attractive layout[/b]. It was just there for two years, so people got used to it.

As it is, I honestly think your monitor is just calibrated strange if you think the site is an ugly purple. To me it's a pleasing blue grey, not unlike Epilogue's old layout. I find it funny that someone so seemingly serious about art could be so against an appropriate layout color.

Neutrals are not pleasing colors. Never will be. DA's baby poo green is not a visually pleasing color, aside from its slightly industrial look, but it's the best neutral green there is. Professional fine artists paint their studios that color.

EVERY other respectable art site displays art in the same manner. With the same family of background colors.

[url=http://www.eatpoo.com/gallery.html]Eatpoo[/url]
[url=http://www.epilogue.net/cgi/database/art/gallery.pl?genre=4]Epilogue[/url] (similar blue grey to what we have now, old layout was a dark grey)
[url=http://portfolio.cgsociety.org/]CGTalk[/url] (excessive colors distract from the work, but the grey is there)
[url=http://www.furiae.com/]Linda Bergkvist[/url]
[url=http://www.conceptart.org/]ConceptArt[/url] (sepia)
[url=http://www.redbeardead.com/main.htm]alex stodolnik[/url] (a personal site, so the neon pink is fine)

You get the idea. Sure, there are a million more visually pleasing layouts. But not for art. People use what works, and this is what works. Of course people don't notice what a difference it makes unless they're already aware of it. If you want a more visually pleasing layout, make one that still adheres to the dark neutral theme. All you suggested was the complete opposite of the point.

And, as I should point out, I did not make this layout. It's merely the best option of what there was. I'm still a french grey fan, but that would piss more people off.

[img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v246/blackleatherart/facfrenchgrey3s.jpg[/img]

or

[img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v246/blackleatherart/facwarmgreys.jpg[/img]
_________________
"I care about people as much as I care about lawn furniture" - Dexter/Michael C. Hall

[unfocused]

"If you want a more visually pleasing layout, make one that still adheres to the dark neutral theme. All you suggested was the complete opposite of the point."

i did, i posted it in SH. it got second most votes, the one we are using now got most votes. it was dark. i even labeled its name as "dark" :/

i really dont have anything against dark colors actually. i do prefer lighter, tho. but really, dark can work, as long as the different shades are used right. i like the wicked dark we are using as a background now, your idea. and i see in IE, denis changed a few things, nice. still not working for firefox yet tho. still, its coming out nice.

[fallenangel]

But your dark one [i]didn't[/i] adhere to the dark neutral idea because the part with the art was too light. It'd be like double matting a piece with white and then black. Defeats the purpose. The point of it is to have the part surrounding the artwork a dark neutral.
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"I care about people as much as I care about lawn furniture" - Dexter/Michael C. Hall

[DragonicFlames]

1) I am annoyed, why? because I didn't get to put any imput on the beta design when it showed up on the forums because we had two days to discuss. I didn't even post anything about anything! I kind of wish we had a WEEK to discuss and see all the kinks out of beta before we switched over.

2) I DO NOT LIKE THE LAYOUT

Can we say, DA? I mean, compare the two sites (when fac is going faster...) side by side.

Sure there are some differences, but same color (basically)

same formatting, same EVERYTHING! (basically... lol )

I mean everything is almost the same. Top bar with pictures, searching sucks, and the gallery crap... OMG I hate that. WTF. I want all my pictures listed in my gallery. ALL OF THEM. NC/17 or not.

It reminds me of some cheap, lame ass, half done DA rip.

And I HATE DA.

3) THE SEARCH SYSTEM?!

WTF! I used the search on the other site to go to people's gallerys NOT their pictures or pictures that have their names in the keywords.

FUCKING GHEY.

4) WTF IS UP WITH THAT COLOR SCHEME?!

No offensive, fallen, but it's le crap.

It makes me want to go all emo on myself.

It's not inviting, it's not friendly, and it looks like someone tried to go EMO all over the damn site.

HELLO.

Our colors were BLUE AND WHITE.

WHERE'D THEY GO?

I HEAR what fallen is saying. "It makes your art look good."

Well that's nice and all, but if no one is LOOKING at my art then what is the POINT of it?

It looks like someone shit on my screen, seriously.

WHERE is the mixture of colors? I'm sorry but I don't find black and grey professional for an art site.

Ok, some black, some grey, some blue (darker or lighter to balance out) and some white is fine. That looks good.

BUT IF I HAVE TO FUCKING SQUINT/HIGHLIGHT TO READ THE DAMN TEXT it's not AWESOME.

5) WHAT HAPPENED TO SAM?

All I see up there is the cat and then the inuyasha and other misc characters.

What, you want fangirls now?


6) THE GODDAMN BANNER ADS.

I know they work to keep the site running, but the first thing that comes up is a friggin' pop up because my curser runs over it by accident while i'm trying to scroll down the damn page. WTF.

I don't need to stratigically place my curser to not get that damn pop-up.


7) AVATARS AND PROFILE PICTURES.

HOW THE HELL...!

I Don't want an avatar picture AND THEN a profile picture. If your going to do that, just make them one and the same. And I can't link from off the site for my avatar. it has to be off the computer to the site.

Um... isn't that eating space? I think so.

Now what I LIKE about the site:


1) The new way of placeing picture.
2) The new pictures in front of my gallery
3) getting emails about lots of stuff.

3 things to 7 things?

Something needs to be corrected.


And I don't like the forums. But I'm not even going into that.

[fallenangel]

If the color scheme is not appropriate for a respectable art site, then [b]why does every god damn professional art site use this family of colors?[/b]

Christ you people are f[color=black]u[/color]cking morons. You want a white site with bright blue accents? Fine. Knock yourselves out. But I'll tell you right now that it screams "little kid site" and sends any decent artists running. I thought you people wanted better art on the site and to attract more serious artists. I'll tell you the same as I told Denis, the better artists would NEVER post on FAC as it was because it looked like a little kid site.

You're shooting yourselves in the foot. You'll have new colors and the same old tedious doodles. There are [i]amazing[/i] fanartists out there. And we have, what, four of them on FAC? You'll never change what FAC is, but you can change how it's perceived. If you go back to white...or light grey that might as well be white...the color change was for nothing.

If you want better artists, artists that thought poorly of FAC before, you have to change what was turning them away. And that was the atmosphere. Browing FAC felt like I was browsing preschool-projects.com. Light, bubbly, and completely un-artistic. I don't want to display my art there. I [b]never[/b] linked anyone to my FAC gallery, always DA. Because my art looks/looked better there. I'm not saying this new color scheme will bring in Pu-Sama and Shley and Aya, but it has a much better chance than the kindgergarten colors did. It [i]will[/i] however bring in people like me who aren't pretentious enough to insist on a pro level community but do want a suitable matte color.

So you have a choice, I guess. Cater to some children and attract more children and basically spend a year in vain. Or make the necessary changes to see the change you/we want in the atmosphere and community. Sitting around saying "boy I wish we had better art instead of crappy sonic pictures" isn't going to convince Pu-Sama that FAC is worth her time. Making a new layout that isn't any better isn't going to either.

Serious artists only post where it's worth it, where their art will be well represented, and where they can gain something besides cock sucking from kids. [i]You[/i] may not care, but you're already here. Everyone who currently posts was already obviously at least ok with how fac was or they'd have never joined. If all we're doing is sucking off the kids, why do all that work in the first place, we had X thousand members happily spitting on paper and calling it art.

The point. I thought. Was to change something. Make it better. Bring in better artists. [b]You're not going to do that with a bad art layout[/b].

I hardly ever update(d) my fac gallery because it was always the kinda lame place to throw up art and get a couple "omg k00l" comments and that was it. It was like posting art on a message board, that's exactly what it made me think of with the color scheme. Not designed to display art at all, just a place to post and get a couple comments. If that's what you want, fine, but it'll only bring in people who don't really care about showing their art.

FAC was the first art site I joined. When I was barely 15 and didn't really care about how it looked. But times change, and now I'm paying 30 grand a year to make my art the best it can be and learn to display it the best way possible. Feeling as I do now, I would run screaming from the old FAC. But I've been a member of only one other site longer, and loyalty keeps me around because I [i]do[/i] love the concept of FAC and what Denis has always tried to do, but maybe it's time to make a decision about [i]exactly[/i] what the purpose of FAC is. If you guys care more about some emails from 13-year-old sonic artists than displaying your art...ok. I thought from all the "upload this to fac, we need all the good art we can get" stuff that my opinion meant something and was the direction we were trying to go.

Perhaps I was mistaken. Perhaps the goal all along was to make a slightly more presentable site with the same lame, juvenile community it's always had. If that's the case, please, disregard my arguments and do what you will with the layout. Make it white with fire engine red borders and blue text for all I care, I'll go back to updating once every six months and posting at DA, it's all the same to me.

But seeing as how I'm stubborn as hell and have invested too much time in FAC to see a great improvement pissed away...

Whatever. Continue making the wrong choices then wondering why nothing's changed. Be as hypocritical as the good doctor Sara and say you live by "Be the change you want to see in the world" but do the exact opposite.

[[as for skins, that's really not much of an improvement. I want to know that [i]other people[/i] are seeing my work presented well, not that I'm looking at theirs with the appropriate backgrounds. But. Ya know. That's just me. What do I know, after all.]]
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"I care about people as much as I care about lawn furniture" - Dexter/Michael C. Hall

[SpiritWolf77]

*tiptoes in*
I don't want to get involved in a big debate between admins/mods here, but I figured I'd offer my two cents as a member of the site and an art major/professional illustrator.

I already stated in my previous comment that I felt a few things were too dark but someone seems to have changed them as I can see headers and links much more easily now.

Second...it [i]is[/i] a generally accepted fact in the professional art world that medium neutral grey is the best color to matte a piece in. I personally find light silvers or blues more asthetically appealing on...say...a message board (which is why I'm using the silver skin to browse the board) but for the purpose of displaying artwork in a gallery setting, grey really is best. Ignoring the logo, the site [i]does[/i] look much more professional now.

I admit I never uploaded much here before because I was always turned off by the layout and colors and overal design of the site. It [i]did[/i] feel like a "little kid" site.
Now I feel excited about uploading more once everything is finished being tweaked to run properly because it feels much more professional, logical, and user-friendly.

I am not really sure how I feel on the black background. It does feel, I think as someone said earlier, very "emo." I get this whole, "I'm reading a high schooler's customized LJ or MySpace" feeling from it. But who knows. I wouldn't know what to suggest in its place without experimenting a bit with colors.

Edit: Oh, and I do want to second the comment on the profile pictures. That needs to be changed somehow. I uploaded a random 100x100 icon just to see what exactly the profile picture was and was not pleased with the result. First off, it blew up the icon to 230x230 so now there's this giant pixely icon wasting space on my page. Second, there's nothing I can do about it because there's no option to simply remove it, only to upload a new one. It takes up too much space on the profile page, pushes the gallery down, and basically steals all the focus. I want people to see my [i]art[/i], not my random profile picture. There should be an option to simply remove it, not just change it, 230x230 should be set as the [i]max[/i] size, not the [i]required[/i] size (so if a user wants to use something smaller, they can) and if the feature is kept, maybe it should be relocated in the layout to someplace where it won't steal so much focus...like above the blog, [i]under[/i] the featured image. But not above the gallery.

[fallenangel]

[b]Thank you[/b].

People also need to remember that your monitor callibration is probably not the same as everyone else's. For example, the site should not look overly purple. If it does, your saturation is too high. The background isn't quite black, it's a dark grey, but it does read black-ish.

The contrast was needed to make the lights read lighter, though. As before it was one mid level, washed out grey.

As for it looking like a customized myspace page...well, you can really thank the layout for that, as it's a popular template style for LJs and such. Easy to customize, and will look like such no matter what colors you choose. The old layout didn't even look customized, it looked like a default forum layout.
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"I care about people as much as I care about lawn furniture" - Dexter/Michael C. Hall

[SpiritWolf77]

*squints* Ah! It is dark grey. It looks black in comparison to the lighter colors. I see your point about that though.

And your point about the Myspace thing too. I do like the layout of the site. I like the boxes, I like the darker headers, I like the way the hierarchy flows. I think part of the problem is that I'm still looking at the unfinished product. Looking at the screenshots of the site with thumbnails makes it look less Myspace-y. It'll probably be easier to form an opinion once everything gets up and running. I don't want to pick apart little things that I don't like while things are still being tweaked.