Design and Layout Suggestions

[zourtney]

Man, I was totally looking at the first post on here, from like May 2008 and I was like "woaaahhh maaan. We lamed."

[Nick]

Well, lets fix that lame!

[Nick]

Looking at the HTML5 canvas stuff, it looks like animated banners will simple and easy on the bandwidth.   Any suggestions as to what we might throw up on the main site?

[Nick]

After thinking a little, I came to the conclusion that very subtle animations would be the best way to go. Not all flashy and distracting but something that rewards a careful observer with leaves swaying in the wind or the gentle rippling of a brook. Perhaps even random animals that run through the banner. With JS so much would be possible.

[zourtney]

That sounds cool. That might be a good thing to play with. It sounds like it's actually coming, so let's learn it! If people start using it, it'll become better supported...right?

And according to an interweb or two, Google apps are going to stop supporting the dreaded IE6. And if they don't bother with old, steamy poo-pile of a browser, why should we? ...Not that Randomland has been robustly tested with obscure/ancient browsers as it is now, but yeah.

But with a little JavaScript you could just tell all things IE to throw up a boring, static banner (and maybe slap a little 'get with the times!' watermark, just for jabs). And with compatible browsers, we can start whipping out the fance. Microsoft will eventually have to get around to supporting this HTML5 thingy, right?

[Nick]

From what I read they will be supporting some of it with the next releases of IE (updated to IE 8 I think) and defiantly with IE 9. So it looks like its all OK to use. Its Kinda exciting to finally get some new HTML to play with. 

[zourtney]

Yeah

HTML was old when we learned it in middle school. I guess it has changed a fair amount, with the shift from table layouts and "under construction" gifs to DIVs and SPANs and database dependence and the proliferation of serverside scripting (PHP/ASP) and client-side scripting (Flash/Silverlight). Still, it always feels like web technologies are two steps behind the way people are trying to use it.

For instance, how long did it take before PHP was a legitimate, object-oriented language?? (It still has a bit of identity crisis, in my opinion.)

Aaaanyway, yeah, what types of Randomlandy things would lend themselves to the visually-oriented programming we could do with this new stuff?

[Nick]

Moving banners, go-cart racing game .. ummm graphs... real time GPS readout of the blazers location on a map....  games of all sorts, the ability to draw on and annotate pictures in the galleries. Stuff like that. You have any ideas?

[zourtney]

Annotations in the galleria sounds the awesome!

Maybe I'll have to start digging in to the Drupal again. There are tons of things I'd like to do with that gallery but don't know how. Theoretically, with images being stored as nodes, we could write our own stuff without really stepping on the toes of all those weird plugings we have installed.

Oops, this belongs in another thread...

[zourtney]

I've been thinkin'...

The entirety of Randomland could use a little refining, as far as design goes. Yeah, the fixing the sidebars to make some sort of navigational sense would be great, but I was thinking of a slightly more thorough and purposeful refinement.

The Good:

• I like the current color scheme we have going. Greens and browns suit us well. Perhaps the blue should go the way of the buffalo.¹
• Top nav is a good approach, breaking the core elements of Randomland into two handfuls of links.²

Um...I'll finish this thought later...

[Nick]

So by "going the way of the buffalo" you mean that its "totally puck rock"?

[zourtney]

And by "handfuls of links" I mean 9, as is the number of fingers of the fictional character Mr. Lyle on that old show "The Pretender." Really, there are 9 links.

But I think we could shave it down a little bit. Maybe to 6 or 7? Opinion has stagnated into oblivion¹ and Reviews still only has one post under it. Finally, the Gallery link still points to the ancients.

Most of the stuff I wrote in Opinion should purposefully be lost forever.

[Brad]

I agree with zourtney. We could easily remove the "Opinion" and "Review" sections and just move all the content over into individual's blogs. You could then put a "Blogs" button on the top navigation bar.

With that done, you should be able to completely get rid of the sidebar.

Also, we should normalize the color scheme a little bit. The green, black and brown thing we've got going is good but the blue nav buttons and blue background seem out of place. I think we should switch those over to a complimentary shade of green.

The gallery could use some major help too. I'd start with actually making the link point to the correct galleries, followed by showing an image's tags when you view an image.

[Nick]

Should we make the main site match the forum colors?

And what is with the random annotations, Zourtney? I am not complaining by any means. Just observing. (Thats where my 'punk rock' comment came from. You link to a wikipedia page about MxPx for the buffalo comment.)

[zourtney]

Until we have brain-mapping software whereupon you can track back why I came to write a particular phrase, this is the best I can do. I'll try not to abuse it. And frankly, that's pretty creepy, so I hope no one is working on such a thing.

I think our blue background gradient thing needs a little help. Maybe a brown or complementary shade of green.