New elYsiun design?

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
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Hello everyone,

elYsiun.com has had it’s current design for quite a while now and I would hereby like to thank Joeri Kassenaar again for helping out in creating the design. I really like the current design but nothing is everlasting. The time has come to look into creating a new design for elYsiun, but since I have neither the talent nor the time to create a new design by myself I need some help!

What will I do
I will write all of the HTML and CSS for elYsiun I do this because I feel that 90% of the time people write very bad HTML code so I want to be in control of this myself.
I will also integrate the HTML code in elYsiun’s template based system because it is quite complex for anyone not familiar with both the structure of elYsiun as the template languages themselves.

What can you do?
Everything else!!
If you could provide a .pdf file with the design in it that would be great, if you could create some HTML mockups as well that would be great (even though I will probably rewrite most of the HTML). After the decision has been made to implement the design we will work with the artist to implement it into elYsiun in a way that is acceptable for everyone involved.

What’s up with the elYsiun logo?
The elYsiun logo will remain the same! I can provide the elYsiun logo in several formats upon request (I will provide a .pdf logo at this page as soon as possible). Since I do understand that the elYsiun logo colors might not fit well within every site design, the color of the logo may change.

What do I like in a design?
Personally I like clean designs much of the design done in HTML and CSS and as little of the design done with pure graphics, but this is not a demand on my side, as long as it looks good and feels good it’s a winner.

What technologies/languages can we use?
The current elYsiun uses several standard that I feel should be used again in a new design they are HTML 4.01 transitional and CSS 1.0, Flash should not be used, JavaScript should be used as little as possible. All images should be JPG or GIF and no animated gifs should be part of the design.
Reason for most of these demands are because I want to remain compatibility with as many browsers as possible that are compatible with HTML 4.01 and CSS 1.0.

Ok I want to create a design, now what?
Please do if you can create a mockup and post a link to that mockup here o we can give you feedback. You can also open a topic in the news & chat forum if you want. We’ll allow several people to be working on a design for elYsiun and will use both the community feedback the designs receive as our own opinions to choose a final design concept and work with the artist to turn that into a working website.

Is there a deadline?
Well not really I would prefer to have the design implemented in the last week of January, since I have that week free. But lets just see where it goes perhaps no one will even respond to this call an the current design will remain.

How do I get credit?
If you want you can place a link to your website at the bottom of all elYsiun pages, in the familiar fashion “designed by -your name here-“

Please feel free to ask any questions you may have in this topic and I will try to answer them.

Thanks and Greets,
Timothy

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Btw, one extra demand:

Thumbnail sizes must remain 180x100 because changing them would require too much work.

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I like the idea of a front page thumbnail/link, to outstanding pieces that revolves from time to time, like at CGTalk. Of course that would mean somebody would have to upload some new files occasionally, but it would certaily be a nice touch.

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Aye that’s a possibility but doesn’t have so much to do with the design it self, things like these can always be added in later.

Timothy

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Would it be possible to have a new design but to also have other designs available for choice. I know that quite a few site allow for the users to have different pre-made designs. That would be cool. Because personally i love the current design.

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Technically possible yes.

Feasible hmm I don’t think so, would require quite a bit of extra work.

Timothy

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Greeat idea :slight_smile:
Me and Monkeyboi will fix something during the next week -or maybe the next-next week, because I have some other jobs first.

ZuiQ

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Function over form (set the “I am a graphic artist, see me roar” mentality aside), and PLEASE…no fixed-width formats, as I find it highly annoying when a web site hijacks my entire desktop.

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I just thought I’d mention that blender.org/blender3d.org is due for an overhaul relatively soon (few months time) which will most likely be linking straight to elysiun.com as the main ‘user forum’. It’d be great if there could be a more unified approach, not meaning combining the sites, but more consistency in navigation, layout to provide a better user experience. I’m not sure how well this figures into any plans, but I thought it would be useful to know.

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is phpBB still going to be the forum code? cause i think if you ugraded it to a newer version, it has support for selecting multiple ‘skins’ in your user prefs.

and remember if it aint broken, brake it!!! :stuck_out_tongue:

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I really like the look of .org myself. Very nice looking. Maybe just use that same theme here as well?

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Similar to what levon already mentioned…

I was wondering, does the whole site run on phpBB? If it does, then like levon said, you could just add a list of theme/styles/templates, and they would be effective in all parts of the site that are integrated into the phpBB system. But you probably already know that. :expressionless:

[edit] Just read something about smarty templating sytem. I guess it isn’t part of the phpBB system?

I think one specific design is better though. The site would lack definition if it were to have numerous available themes. :slight_smile:

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No not the entire site runs on phpBB infact only the forum runs on phpBB, however the rest of the site does use the same user database and the same sessions system.

I’ve decided against using the phpBB templating system for the rest of elYsiun because it isn’t very powerfull.
The Smarty templating engine is used on the rest of the site.

And I too feel that a single design is good for the identity of the website,… though I have thought about multiple color schemes which perhaps even change per page (like the old blender.nl site), this would be simple to achieve.

Timothy

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Yay!

… umm, if I had any reasonable color-sense I would do this
(well, I guess I also have to find time around the other websites I am working on)

but the grey is cool!

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Timothy - now that I look at the vesion you have of phpbb, I would concider using the newer 2.06 code.

IMO the layout of this template is great … easy to look at and easy for the 56K’ers. I’m curious though as to how many people have offered to help design graphics and whatnot?

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Sofar only ZuiQ and Monkeyboi have stated they want to create a design.

I will upgrade elYsiun to phpBB 2.2 when it’s out.

Timothy

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I came up with a rough idea for a banner.
<edit> remember this is just rough…
http://home.att.net/~zolgnar/banner2.jpg

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Why do we need a new design?

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Because the old one is orange and brown, which reminds me of hamburgers. I’m just providing my own input,…I don’t expect anyone to do back flips over it though.

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[edit]