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I agree about the icons: Having straight text displays is much more obvious.
I hope a graphic artist of some sort can swoop in and fix the design :P
There are skins that remove the icons. Most notably Stanzilla's. Both of mine do too (because of Stan), but I just kind of screw around so most people probably won't like my changes :p
My theme is a work in progress but it's an improvement from my point of view. The font sizes are temporary, until I can figure out how to break that evil inheritance thing that so pesters me.
It works, it isn't though aesthetically pleasing is what I meant.
It mirrors the theme that's been used for wowace for many moons. I don't see the huge problem. Ofc some tweaks could be made for those that are hard of ... sight? seeing? w/e But the initial skin is fine. You don't need flash apps flying across the screen everywhere, or graffiti and logos behind every letter.
In any case, if it doesn't suit your needs, then just make your own theme. Bada bing, your aethetic problem is solved.
It mirrors the theme that's been used for wowace for many moons. I don't see the huge problem. Ofc some tweaks could be made for those that are hard of ... sight? seeing? w/e But the initial skin is fine. You don't need flash apps flying across the screen everywhere, or graffiti and logos behind every letter.
In any case, if it doesn't suit your needs, then just make your own theme. Bada bing, your aethetic problem is solved.
Ugh, CurseForge has been changed too. The old look was at least functional... the new look is full of yet more hard-to-read gradients and unnecessary rounded corners, and the new font has poor legibility without high magnification. :(
In any case, if it doesn't suit your needs, then just make your own theme. Bada bing, your aethetic problem is solved.
I have neither the time nor the inclination to learn the strange pseudo-CSS in which themes are defined just to get something I can use without having to squint even at 250% magnification. I've looked through all of the themes currently defined, and all of them suffer from low contrast and/or tiny fonts; there isn't a single one that's significantly more readable than the default.
Here are a list of things I'd like to see in a theme, in case someone has time to whip something up:
1) Readable font faces and sizes. Arial is horrible for readability. Verdana was designed specifically for screen viewing, with wide, open shapes that don't require huge sizes to read for people with astigmatism. A 12- or 14-pixel font size is comfortable if contrast is good.
2) Readable, comfortable colors. Black-on-white or yellow-on-black have great contrast, but are rather painful to try to read for more than a line or two of text. TankSpot is a good example of a readable and comforatble color scheme -- the gray background is neutral, and neither too bright nor too dark, and the plain black text has sufficient contrast.
Other points that would be nice, but are not required:
3) Text instead of icons for most things. Category icons are one example of somewhere text is more suitable. The "swooping green arrow" icons that seem to usually indicate an expandable section are another; the icon itself makes me think that clicking on it will either refresh the page or open a new window. A simple text link stating [expand] or a more traditional "arrow" icon would be better. I'm not sure if themes have any control over icons though, so simply changing that to text would be fine.
4) Elements that are not interactable should not look like buttons. Most of the headings in the default layout look like buttons, with beveled borders and a different background shade than the surrounding page.
5) Consistency. A web page should not be a quilt of overlapping boxes with borders and backgrounds that are slightly varying shades of the same color. Borders break up the page and make it look cramped. Varying colors used for no reason just look sloppy, and negates the effectiveness of using colors for reasons (such as denoting a block of quoted text with a different background color).
Regarding the icons on the Projects page (another of Phanx's complaits). They do not work. Period. They are too big and the mixing of WoW art and non WoW icons mixes about as well as oil and water. In order to find what the icon means, the user has to mouse over the icon. They are not intutive at all. A few examples (pity I can use the acutal images since they seem to be place using a script so I can use the "View Image" feature of Firefox):
Buffs - an image of a flexing man. That does NOT say buffs (as in the magical sort) to me. This one from WoWWiki fits the bill better:
Combat - A shield with a "sword" crossed over it. That sword looks more like a white line. To be honest the icon use for "PvP" (two crossed blades) works better for combat
PvP - two crossed blades. This does not say "PvP" to me. It's better used for Combat. One of the old Rank icons would work better here.
Arena - the old Badge of Justice icon. BoJ for Arena? Nope, this does not work here. A better depiction would be something that looks like an Arena (like an image of the Roman Colosseum) works better here. Or the Arena Points Icon from WoW:
Plug-ins - an image of a glowing electrical plug. This works somewhat. However the Mozilla image of a green puzzle works better here. Keep it simple.
LDB - an image of an electrical plug. WTF? How does an electrical plug translate into a data display AddOn?
Boss - a generic Dragon. Seriously, a dragon could mean anything in WoW. Why not use an acutal boss icon like Raggy? Something iconic.
Tanking - generic shield. A generic shield icon does not say "Tank" (unless you are a Warrior or Tankadin).
I am sure there are more that I missed.
I'm the one who was commissioned to do these icons, and Kaelten requested the subject matter on most of these icons. Your post is far from constructive, and sounds like an angry WoW player complaining for the billionth time about their class on their respective board. Let me tell you some things:
1. I was requested to have all my icons done at a 1024x1024 resolution, and I've made measures to make them look recognizable at 50x50. When I submitted them to the Curse staff, they approved of the icons before I uploaded them to this site.
2. You seem to be an artistic genious, so why don't you think of a better subject for the Plugin category that can make sense to the general population? How about LDB while you're at it? If you have a WAY better idea for an icon for those mods that people can recognize (and isn't plain text, because then what's the point of an icon anyway?)
3. A generic dragon: have you ever played the game? If you look at the full resolution icon, people that play the game and have done most raid content will see that that "generic dragon" is Vaelastrasz.
4. I do agree with you about some of the icons from the game itself, such as PVP, Arena, Tanking, etc. I've raised the subject with Kaelten, and he and the rest of the Curse staff were content with what they had already.
The icons I've made were on the beta WowAce category page for a few days before the release of 2.0. They were open for the public to see, and giving feedback on them was encouraged. I spent several hours remaking/altering icons so the Curse staff would be satisfied with my work.
My last suggestion is, if you're going to complain about someone's artwork, be constructive - terrible feedback like this DOES end up being seen by the artist.
Hi guys, I'd just like to take a second to say that I'm sorry we didn't see this earlier.
I'm _very_ interested in good suggestions. We've been working slowly to make changes and tweaks to the default themes that will improve usability and readability. The CurseForge theme has gotten the most of these since I felt it was the definitively weaker.
So to answer a handful of points.
1) Icons - Icons can display a lot more in a small space than text can. Which is why we've gone that way in so many places. That being said, because we use css to display the images in 99% of the cases they are 100% themable. Not all of our icon choices are great, however we're willing to take good suggestions.
2) Lose of theme settings - This issue has been resolved, we've switched from cookies to db based settings on it.
3) Fonts - No one agrees on this, so we tried to come up with something that people agree with overall.
4) Colors - Again, not many people agree here. It can't be helped that there are people who are upset by the choices made, again though, that's why we provide theming.
5) Scroll speed issues - we tracked this down to being an FF3.x on WinXP issue with rendering rounded corners. As a result we redesigned the comments display to have less rounded corners and will continue seeing what we can do to make it better. It seems to be largely fixed for most people now.
6) Theming system power - We're going to be working hard to bring more power into the theming system as well.
I'll be watching this thread from here on out, please let me know what we can do to make things better.
I'm the one who was commissioned to do these icons, and Kaelten requested the subject matter on most of these icons. Your post is far from constructive, and sounds like an angry WoW player complaining for the billionth time about their class on their respective board. Let me tell you some things:
Whoa, chill out. I was trying to provide some constructive feedback however you decided to go way off the deep end! Sure I understand that the icons are your baby, however if someone has some feedback, it would help to put your emotions aside and respond in a somewhat neutral fashion. Getting angsty is not the way to go.
1. I was requested to have all my icons done at a 1024x1024 resolution, and I've made measures to make them look recognizable at 50x50. When I submitted them to the Curse staff, they approved of the icons before I uploaded them to this site.
I don't know the specifications behind the project so I cannot comment much here.
2. You seem to be an artistic genious, so why don't you think of a better subject for the Plugin category that can make sense to the general population? How about LDB while you're at it? If you have a WAY better idea for an icon for those mods that people can recognize (and isn't plain text, because then what's the point of an icon anyway?)
I did, the Mozilla style puzzle piece or the Mac style Lego block. These are both icons that internet users have seen for years now. Mac users know the Lego block and many Windows users do too after importing various Mac icons sets. Likewise the Puzzle pieces has been used in some fashion since Netscape 3. To me, that just says "Plug-in"
LDB would need some work however IMHO (again this is my opinion), the current icon does not really work. I don't have any suggestions here at the moment.
3. A generic dragon: have you ever played the game? If you look at the full resolution icon, people that play the game and have done most raid content will see that that "generic dragon" is Vaelastrasz.
Sadly, Vael is not a unique model and has been used and reused so many times. It's a Red Dragon, it's not a Unique model. Yes, I have done much of the raid content in this game except for AQ40 and Naxx 1.0 (my guild was not ready for either before BC hit).
4. I do agree with you about some of the icons from the game itself, such as PVP, Arena, Tanking, etc. I've raised the subject with Kaelten, and he and the rest of the Curse staff were content with what they had already.
No problem there
The icons I've made were on the beta WowAce category page for a few days before the release of 2.0. They were open for the public to see, and giving feedback on them was encouraged. I spent several hours remaking/altering icons so the Curse staff would be satisfied with my work.
I did not know there was a beta for an upcoming release for a new CurseForge/WoWAce page. I did stumble across it once about a week prior to release, however I did not linger long as I was in seach of something. However I did not see any type of info regarding an upcoming site revamp (and I check these boards regularly however I don't check the CurseForge forums) and thus the new site was a bit of a surprise.
My last suggestion is, if you're going to complain about someone's artwork, be constructive - terrible feedback like this DOES end up being seen by the artist.
I was trying to be constructive. Take the filter off before you read the feedback and put yourself in the viewer's position. I do some artistic endeavors myself and one thing I have learned is to take criticism, postive or negative. You are not going to please everyone, however when you respond to criticism in any fashion, put your emotions in the corner first and be somewhat diplomatic. If you really don't like what I have to say, then just ignore me. I will understand.
Yeah and the themes section will be properly linked and integrated into the site once we're a little more comfortable with it.
I'd be fully up to hearing people's ideas of how and where to integrate it.
Can you make it not require coding for the most general settings? Not that I don't want or can't work with it, but it just seems like a lot of effort on my part for a website. Could there be a profile section where you can adjust font, background color, foreground color, visited links color, title color, icons ON or OFF, rounded corners... etc? And then have it create a theme for you automatically that you can then edit if you wish for power users.
Can you make it not require coding for the most general settings? Not that I don't want or can't work with it, but it just seems like a lot of effort on my part for a website. Could there be a profile section where you can adjust font, background color, foreground color, visited links color, title color, icons ON or OFF, rounded corners... etc? And then have it create a theme for you automatically that you can then edit if you wish for power users.
If it helps, I found that custom themes are based off of the default, so you can just add lines of code for the specific things you want to change. I was able to turn off rounded corners and gradients with 2 lines of code.
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Curse PremiumI hope a graphic artist of some sort can swoop in and fix the design :P
There are skins that remove the icons. Most notably Stanzilla's. Both of mine do too (because of Stan), but I just kind of screw around so most people probably won't like my changes :p
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Curse Premiumhttp://www.wowace.com/themes/stormfx/
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Curse PremiumI find it quite functional not primitive..
Also understand that there are only 2 ppl working on it, and they got alot of other projects here at wowace/curseforge to work on as well.
It works, it isn't though aesthetically pleasing is what I meant.
It mirrors the theme that's been used for wowace for many moons. I don't see the huge problem. Ofc some tweaks could be made for those that are hard of ... sight? seeing? w/e But the initial skin is fine. You don't need flash apps flying across the screen everywhere, or graffiti and logos behind every letter.
In any case, if it doesn't suit your needs, then just make your own theme. Bada bing, your aethetic problem is solved.
Okay. ;)
I have neither the time nor the inclination to learn the strange pseudo-CSS in which themes are defined just to get something I can use without having to squint even at 250% magnification. I've looked through all of the themes currently defined, and all of them suffer from low contrast and/or tiny fonts; there isn't a single one that's significantly more readable than the default.
Here are a list of things I'd like to see in a theme, in case someone has time to whip something up:
1) Readable font faces and sizes. Arial is horrible for readability. Verdana was designed specifically for screen viewing, with wide, open shapes that don't require huge sizes to read for people with astigmatism. A 12- or 14-pixel font size is comfortable if contrast is good.
2) Readable, comfortable colors. Black-on-white or yellow-on-black have great contrast, but are rather painful to try to read for more than a line or two of text. TankSpot is a good example of a readable and comforatble color scheme -- the gray background is neutral, and neither too bright nor too dark, and the plain black text has sufficient contrast.
Other points that would be nice, but are not required:
3) Text instead of icons for most things. Category icons are one example of somewhere text is more suitable. The "swooping green arrow" icons that seem to usually indicate an expandable section are another; the icon itself makes me think that clicking on it will either refresh the page or open a new window. A simple text link stating [expand] or a more traditional "arrow" icon would be better. I'm not sure if themes have any control over icons though, so simply changing that to text would be fine.
4) Elements that are not interactable should not look like buttons. Most of the headings in the default layout look like buttons, with beveled borders and a different background shade than the surrounding page.
5) Consistency. A web page should not be a quilt of overlapping boxes with borders and backgrounds that are slightly varying shades of the same color. Borders break up the page and make it look cramped. Varying colors used for no reason just look sloppy, and negates the effectiveness of using colors for reasons (such as denoting a block of quoted text with a different background color).
I'm the one who was commissioned to do these icons, and Kaelten requested the subject matter on most of these icons. Your post is far from constructive, and sounds like an angry WoW player complaining for the billionth time about their class on their respective board. Let me tell you some things:
1. I was requested to have all my icons done at a 1024x1024 resolution, and I've made measures to make them look recognizable at 50x50. When I submitted them to the Curse staff, they approved of the icons before I uploaded them to this site.
2. You seem to be an artistic genious, so why don't you think of a better subject for the Plugin category that can make sense to the general population? How about LDB while you're at it? If you have a WAY better idea for an icon for those mods that people can recognize (and isn't plain text, because then what's the point of an icon anyway?)
3. A generic dragon: have you ever played the game? If you look at the full resolution icon, people that play the game and have done most raid content will see that that "generic dragon" is Vaelastrasz.
4. I do agree with you about some of the icons from the game itself, such as PVP, Arena, Tanking, etc. I've raised the subject with Kaelten, and he and the rest of the Curse staff were content with what they had already.
The icons I've made were on the beta WowAce category page for a few days before the release of 2.0. They were open for the public to see, and giving feedback on them was encouraged. I spent several hours remaking/altering icons so the Curse staff would be satisfied with my work.
My last suggestion is, if you're going to complain about someone's artwork, be constructive - terrible feedback like this DOES end up being seen by the artist.
I'm _very_ interested in good suggestions. We've been working slowly to make changes and tweaks to the default themes that will improve usability and readability. The CurseForge theme has gotten the most of these since I felt it was the definitively weaker.
So to answer a handful of points.
1) Icons - Icons can display a lot more in a small space than text can. Which is why we've gone that way in so many places. That being said, because we use css to display the images in 99% of the cases they are 100% themable. Not all of our icon choices are great, however we're willing to take good suggestions.
2) Lose of theme settings - This issue has been resolved, we've switched from cookies to db based settings on it.
3) Fonts - No one agrees on this, so we tried to come up with something that people agree with overall.
4) Colors - Again, not many people agree here. It can't be helped that there are people who are upset by the choices made, again though, that's why we provide theming.
5) Scroll speed issues - we tracked this down to being an FF3.x on WinXP issue with rendering rounded corners. As a result we redesigned the comments display to have less rounded corners and will continue seeing what we can do to make it better. It seems to be largely fixed for most people now.
6) Theming system power - We're going to be working hard to bring more power into the theming system as well.
I'll be watching this thread from here on out, please let me know what we can do to make things better.
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Project AuthorI'd be fully up to hearing people's ideas of how and where to integrate it.
Whoa, chill out. I was trying to provide some constructive feedback however you decided to go way off the deep end! Sure I understand that the icons are your baby, however if someone has some feedback, it would help to put your emotions aside and respond in a somewhat neutral fashion. Getting angsty is not the way to go.
I don't know the specifications behind the project so I cannot comment much here.
I did, the Mozilla style puzzle piece or the Mac style Lego block. These are both icons that internet users have seen for years now. Mac users know the Lego block and many Windows users do too after importing various Mac icons sets. Likewise the Puzzle pieces has been used in some fashion since Netscape 3. To me, that just says "Plug-in"
LDB would need some work however IMHO (again this is my opinion), the current icon does not really work. I don't have any suggestions here at the moment.
Sadly, Vael is not a unique model and has been used and reused so many times. It's a Red Dragon, it's not a Unique model. Yes, I have done much of the raid content in this game except for AQ40 and Naxx 1.0 (my guild was not ready for either before BC hit).
No problem there
I did not know there was a beta for an upcoming release for a new CurseForge/WoWAce page. I did stumble across it once about a week prior to release, however I did not linger long as I was in seach of something. However I did not see any type of info regarding an upcoming site revamp (and I check these boards regularly however I don't check the CurseForge forums) and thus the new site was a bit of a surprise.
I was trying to be constructive. Take the filter off before you read the feedback and put yourself in the viewer's position. I do some artistic endeavors myself and one thing I have learned is to take criticism, postive or negative. You are not going to please everyone, however when you respond to criticism in any fashion, put your emotions in the corner first and be somewhat diplomatic. If you really don't like what I have to say, then just ignore me. I will understand.
Can you make it not require coding for the most general settings? Not that I don't want or can't work with it, but it just seems like a lot of effort on my part for a website. Could there be a profile section where you can adjust font, background color, foreground color, visited links color, title color, icons ON or OFF, rounded corners... etc? And then have it create a theme for you automatically that you can then edit if you wish for power users.
If it helps, I found that custom themes are based off of the default, so you can just add lines of code for the specific things you want to change. I was able to turn off rounded corners and gradients with 2 lines of code.