Styles! Help us find some new looks to try

[rdearman]

Am I misunderstanding something or is any 3.1.x theme supposed to fit?

We should be able to load any of the 3.1x themes and given in EMK's link.

[pir]

My eyes would really much, much, much prefer a dark background, and while I don't love the blue/orange combo in Digi, I'd be ok with it just because at least it's dark -- but Digi has the problem of being much too wide. I don't want to change my browser window every time I come here. Alas the choice of dark themes for 3.1.x is tiny on the site @emk gave; there is another one called "Black" which is also too wide, one designed for anime sites, which is narrower, but looks very... anime, *grin*, and one designed for WoW, which also looks it; both seem less suitable for this site.

So the only good choice I see is to take a theme many of us like (such as we_universal), and flip the colours. I'm going to look at what is involved in that; if it's not too much work (like just changing colours in a CSS file), I can find time to do it.

[Serpent]

There are some nice dark styles on the site I linked to: 1, 2, 3 (all with a black rather than dark bg), and hey i also like the violet one

Also, I believe it should be trivial to change pictures in WoW or anime themes.

[pir]

Ah, sorry, somehow I missed that was a link. I'll check those out.

I don't really like a completely black background either, because then the contrast can easily become painful. A dark grey with white text tends to work best for me, and that can usually still please people who need a high contrast.

From a purely personal colour preference point, purple is not a colour I like in anything but plums.

Yes, background images are trivial to change, but icon sets less so. It's easy to find/make a new background image and swap it out (I rather like the one @emk made for we_universal). But icon sets and other decorative images are more of a pain, one has to find better ones that also fits, because making them yourself is a lot of work. Icons are often aliased against a specific background, and consequently those that were created for a light background will look like crap on a dark one. It also depends on how well the style is designed, sometimes everything has been minutely adjusted for specific size images, other times the creator has built in a lot of flexibility. The same goes for colours, the best styles are generic and flexible and change colours in one stylesheet, other ones require changes all over the place. Happily for some styles there are also customizers that allow very easy changes to colours -- like this one: http://www.colorizeit.com/browse/28/php ... tyles.html.

It's been years since I've played with phpBB styles, I have no idea what all has changed since.

Edit: That site has no demo version, which means I'd have to install phpBB 3.1 on my system and download them. That's a bit of a pain; I don't have time for that until the end of the month. Ah, but the style designer of the first 3 you like has a demo on his own site, yay -- http://styles.gotskillslounge.com/index.php?. proDVGFX is too wide, as is 360Elite, but DVGFX works. The "backmost" background is black, but the background for the actual text is dark grey -- still a bit dark, but acceptable, and it should be good for people who need high contrast. It's stylistically a bit more glossy-icon than I prefer -- I really like we_universal -- but it's fine, and it's DARK! The standard smilies look horrible with it because they're anti-aliased against a white background. We'd have to find another set.

How do other dark-style lovers like it, could y'all have a look?

[Serpent]

Hmm it looks a bit dull to me (the link colour specifically) But definitely better than digi or black.

Haha so we dark theme folks also vary I don't care about the width (but then again I don't like huge screen resolutions - I specifically made sure I can use 1366x768 on my new 15 inch laptop), and I generally prefer non-white on black. Purple, orange, green, whatever.

[pir]

Agreed about the dullness, I also prefer non-white colours for text; high contrast is always a bit bothersome. My favourite colour scheme is a light amber text on a dark brown-tinged grey, *grin*, but that would not be good for people who prefer high contrast. So yeah, we're unlikely to please everyone equally, but having it be dark, not too wide, and readable is more important to me than precisely what colours. Maybe we could have two dark themes, one very simple, one a bit more jazzy.

I didn't use to care about width before I got a wide screen monitor which runs at 1920 x 1080. Now my browser takes up much of that width (lots of tabs, very handy), but that means that completely fluid styles exceed what I can comfortably read. I think dealing well with resolution is more important than ever today, because people read the same sites on so many different devices, from smartphones to wide screen monitors. I really like sites that have a variety of choices for styles -- I could always override things in my browser, but that requires high degrees of fiddling, and even if I did that, nobody else with similar issues can share it.

I had a closer look at we_universal: the colours are spread all throughout the stylesheets AND it inherits from prosilver, so this might be a bit of work -- seems like nothing much has changed in regard to ease of style customization since my days with phpBB; it's still messy. It's not a huge problem, just tedious. The icons are a bigger problem, we'd have to find a different set (icons could be taken from any style, including older ones, as long as the copyright allows it). I did find a dark icon set for prosilver, though it's low contrast and unfortunately not transparent on the inside -- but low contrast is easier to change than re-aliasing, and they are mostly the same size as the we_universal ones, so could just be plugged in. It's a very complete set, all topic icons as well as the small flotsam and buttons. I also found a set of dark-aliased smileys.

Hm. I haven't done a graphic project in ages. Now I am kinda itching to make a nice, simple, dark theme just for us, and it'd be something I could contribute to the site since I am too burnt out to offer any programming help; I just can't really start on it before mid October. We could pick one now that works alright, like DVGFX, and then I could make one that better suits us, with input from people about typography and other concerns.

[emk]

Thank you for all your feedback!

After having read through this thread, it seems like:

• we_universal is the most popular "general purpose" theme, and it looks fairly clean and modern.
• Lots of people want a "dark" theme, and we may want to spend some time trying to a find a better one than we have now.
• There's a number of people who like the blue phpBB default theme, so we should keep it around for good.

Here's what I propose:

1. We keep the current phpBB theme available for anybody who likes it.
2. The people who like dark themes should look at the choices mentioned above and pick out one or two for me to install experimentally.
3. We should change the default theme to "we_universal".
4. OPTIONAL, ONE TIME ONLY: When we change the default theme for the site, I have the option to change everybody's theme to the new theme at once. This would make it much easier for most people to see the new look and feel. And of course, anybody who wanted the blue theme or a dark theme could switch back immediately.

What do people think? Does this sound reasonable? And should we switch all existing accounts to "we_universal", and then let people customize things as desired again, or should we leave most existing accounts on the "blue" theme?

Please let me know what you think! Unless people object, I'm likely to go ahead with (3) soon, but I'm very open to suggestions about (4). Thank you to everyone who helped evaluate and test the themes!

[sfuqua]

I like 4.
3 is fine.

[Montmorency]

@emk: Happy with your proposals.

However, I was just wondering whether the hieroglyph picture in the top background really needs to be quite so dark.

To my eyes it gives a rather jarring contrast (in we_universal) to the relatively light general background.

Perhaps if it were lighter, the white text would be less legible. There may be ways round that however.

[reineke]

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