Styles! Help us find some new looks to try

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emk
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Styles! Help us find some new looks to try

Postby emk » Fri Aug 14, 2015 9:52 pm

phpBB supports custom styles, which can change the overall appearance of the site. These can change fonts and colors, and some of them look nice and modern.

There's a database of styles here. We're specifically interested in styles for version 3.1.5.

If you get the urge to take a look through the choices, I'd love to hear some suggestions. If we find some good choices, then maybe rdearman will encourage me to try one out. :-)

I'm personally fond of the "Basic" style, which feels clean, simple and modern to me. But I'm totally interested in what other gems people can find. And yes, reasonably-sized fonts and good typography are a plus on a language forum.
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Re: Styles! Help us find some new looks to try

Postby neofight78 » Fri Aug 14, 2015 10:38 pm

I like we_universal, it has a nice clean look to it.
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Re: Styles! Help us find some new looks to try

Postby emk » Sat Aug 15, 2015 12:05 am

neofight78 wrote:I like we_universal, it has a nice clean look to it.

I like the viewer!

Here are the ones I've found so far with "simple" looks:

  1. Basic
  2. Elegance
  3. Simplicity
And of course, we'd need a good logo. I'd love to try something with interesting letters from different languages. The hieroglyphs for "people" are definitely tempting:

Image
(but re-rendered at larger size in a better font)

But there are lots of visually wonderful characters in other writing systems. It would be fun to choose things which were significant, and which were somehow related to the forum.
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Re: Styles! Help us find some new looks to try

Postby Zireael » Sat Aug 15, 2015 12:23 pm

Out of all the styles, I like we_universal the most and Simplicity the second.

EDIT: For characters, I personally like الناس تعلم اللغات - that is "people learning languages" in Arabic. I hope the verb is correct (my level in Arabic isn't that great).

EDIT 2: Chinese for "people learning languages" is 人们学习语言 according to GT. Chinese has the added bonus of that you can arrange them almost however you wish for the logo.
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Re: Styles! Help us find some new looks to try

Postby emk » Sat Aug 15, 2015 7:50 pm

We now have an experimental style you can try!

Below, I'm browsing the forum in French using we_universal:

langs-we_universal-test.png

To change, click on your name on the upper right, go the User Control Panel, and then to Board Preferences, and look for styles.

Please note that this is incredibly experimental, and it may have to go away if we discover security or stability issues, or if rdearman thinks I'm totally out of control. :-)
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Re: Styles! Help us find some new looks to try

Postby emk » Sat Aug 15, 2015 7:59 pm

And because I know Serpent likes white-on-black themes, I've also added digi for people to try out:

langs-digi-test.png

Please feel welcome to set up a theme and try it out! I'm especially interested in knowing whether you can read the fonts without any trouble, and how well the themes work for day-to-day use.
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Re: Styles! Help us find some new looks to try

Postby Arnaud » Sat Aug 15, 2015 8:05 pm

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Last edited by Arnaud on Tue Sep 13, 2016 5:39 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Styles! Help us find some new looks to try

Postby daegga » Sat Aug 15, 2015 8:13 pm

The dark theme seems easier on the eyes, but with Redshift on the contrast is bad, which impacts readability (much like on old HTLAL). The light theme doesn't have the contrast issues.
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Re: Styles! Help us find some new looks to try

Postby Serpent » Sat Aug 15, 2015 9:20 pm

I totally prefer we_universal so far :oops:
The dark one looks cool, but it was surprisingly tiring :roll: I love the icons for read and unread posts, but the main font is meeeeh. The notification box looks great though. i think it uses Verdana? ❤
And emoticons get a white contour around them :( :?
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LyricsTraining now has Finnish and Polish :)
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Re: Styles! Help us find some new looks to try

Postby Serpent » Sat Aug 15, 2015 9:37 pm

But thank you so much for installing it for me, of course :!: ;)
Would it be possible to make the interface text in the profile box bold, to make it more readable? Or a different colour but then it would have to be tweaked per style.. Admittedly most profiles are more easily readable than mine :lol: :P
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LyricsTraining now has Finnish and Polish :)
Corrections welcome


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