# New Front Page Icons



## Intrope

Just thought I'd mention that I really like the new icons (the Forum Mob icon especially!).

Very nice!


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## Morrus

They're not all finished yet - as you can see, some still need to be coloured.

Now I need a crash course in mouseover highlighting!


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## Mark

Nice job!  I like the red background on mouse-over.  Very easy to see what is what.


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## Morrus

Mark said:


> Nice job!  I like the red background on mouse-over.  Very easy to see what is what.




I'm not sure about the colour - is the red maybe a bit too much?


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## cougent

I really hate to be the bucket of cold water, but YES the red is definitely too much.

It may also be my 47 year old luddite nature saying this, but I liked the menu bar better than the icon bar.  I don't hate the icon bar, just preffered the menu bar is all.  Perhaps a way to switch between them?  Leave the icon bar as default for all the new GUIites, but have the menu bar option for us luddites.


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## Intrope

Morrus said:


> I'm not sure about the colour - is the red maybe a bit too much?



Yah, the red's a tad much (I'm using the white background BTW). 

Maybe the gold you use for borders, or even the solid dark grey you use in the black skin for alternate columns. 

BTW, thanks for providing & improving the white skin; I find it much easier on the eyes!


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## aurance

I love the new icons!

Not a big fan of the red, however. Disturbingly clashy.


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## jdrakeh

The new icons look great!


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## Aus_Snow

Second not liking the extreme red much. But also liking the images, on the whole. Pretty cool.

The ENnies logo still isn't being cached like all the others. Offsite still? Basically, not living with all the other images? Seems odd, is all. When the front page is cached, everything's there when I load it up, bam. . . except that one image.

Hm, or is that just me?


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## Angel Tarragon

I like the new icons, I just don't like the red highlight.


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## Knightfall

Reveille said:


> I like the new icons, I just don't like the red highlight.



Agreed.


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## Truth Seeker

Finally, a new look.

One small problem, the News Section is not accessible to my mobile.


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## Reynard

Also came to give the new icons a big thumbs up. Awesome job.


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## Kid Charlemagne

The Icons are very nice - my only complaint is that the text is a little small on a couple - the "wiki" one in particular is tough to read.  I don't know if thats a function of the specific characters being harder to read, or if the font size is slightly smaller.


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## Inferno!

I'll join the chorus and say I love the new icons too.


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## Mark

Morrus said:


> I'm not sure about the colour - is the red maybe a bit too much?





Looks fine on mine but maybe make it blood red to appease those with more sensitive eyes.


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## Umbran

Nitpicky usability note - the red color will probably be unimpressive to a couple of percent of the users, as they're color-blind.

Personally, I'd just go with a border rather than a color, perhaps in gold or grey...


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## DagazUlf

Really cool icons.


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## boerngrim

*Tardis*

Is the TARDIS forum no more?


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## Morrus

boerngrim said:


> Is the TARDIS forum no more?




Eh?  It's running fine.  Are you having trouble accessing it?


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## boerngrim

Morrus said:


> Eh? It's running fine. Are you having trouble accessing it?




I was accessing it from the ENWorld frontpage, but I'm not seeing the link now.


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## Kid Charlemagne

Incidentally, when I mentioned the size on the Wiki icon being small, I meant on the smaller icon versions at the top of the forum page - on the front page they look great.  I concur that the red back ground thing is kind of annoying, and a good point was made in regard to folks who might be color blind having trouble seeing it.


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## Morrus

boerngrim said:


> I was accessing it from the ENWorld frontpage, but I'm not seeing the link now.




I don't have a theme matching image for it yet, but it's still running.

http://www.tardissite.com


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## boerngrim

Morrus said:


> I don't have a theme matching image for it yet, but it's still running.
> 
> http://www.tardissite.com




Thanks! After you said it was running, I googled tardis forums and found it.


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## billd91

I often use my browser with it set to not automatically download graphics. Makes it a little more bandwidth friendly at work (and keeps me in less trouble with the systems guys). 

The links on the front page, when the icons aren't loaded, don't work in my Firefox (some 2.0.0.3 build).


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## Brown Jenkin

The icons are nice but I agree that the ones at the top of the page it is hard to read the text. Perhaps a straight text link under each ones so that they are easier to read.


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## weem

Another "good icons, bad red highlight" vote


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## CapnZapp

billd91 said:


> don't work in my Firefox (some 2.0.0.3 build).



Perhaps time to upgrade, if only to keep out of trouble from your systems guys? 

(The latest version is *3*.0.6, and version 2 doesn't get security updates any longer. Hint hint nudge nudge)


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## CapnZapp

I look forward to seeing the end result!  

The icons are very neat, but them place-holder red mouse-overs look very crude, and mar the overall impression. I'm sure they're just temporary, though.


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## Thanee

*Frontpage Icons:* Great! 

*Forum Icons:* Crappy. They need to be redrawn, not just scaled, if you want them to look professional; especially or at least the text. This way many of them look horrible, I'm afraid.

*Red Background:* Yes it's too much. I would go with something more like Umbran's suggestion and just use a border. Also, in the forum icon bar, the background does not have the same size for each icon (the last few are narrower).

Bye
Thanee


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## Brown Jenkin

I think part of the problems I am having with the icons is that there is no consistant location for the text. My eye is forced to look over each image trying to find the text instead of just knowing where to jump to in order to figure out what each icon is.


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## Lord Sessadore

Add me to the "awesome icons, not so awesome highlighting" column. 

Also, the formatting of the nav bar at the top of the Wiki pages is messed up now. The bar with username, account, etc... is right through the middle of the general ENWorld nav bar (the one with the fancy new icons). Also, the tabs (discussion, edit, etc...) are a ways above the page, so they don't really look like tabs anymore. I have a feeling this is probably due to reformatting the nav bar to use the new icons.


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## billd91

CapnZapp said:


> Perhaps time to upgrade, if only to keep out of trouble from your systems guys?
> 
> (The latest version is *3*.0.6, and version 2 doesn't get security updates any longer. Hint hint nudge nudge)




Ah, thanks. The links now work with graphics not downloading. Much better.


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## gill_smoke

*new  icons*

I have to echo the great job on the icons.

As a user of the working white background I too find the flash of red on mouseover distracting. Maybe you could do lineart icons to full color icons on mouseover. Just saying, it's subtle with a flash. the other way around would work to give the visual cue too.

Hey why is the edit box Black when the rest of the site is white?


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## Morrus

I can't work out how to do it with just borders around the cells on mouseover, so I tried changing the colour to one a little lighter.  Is the orange any better?


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## Intrope

Morrus said:


> I can't work out how to do it with just borders around the cells on mouseover, so I tried changing the colour to one a little lighter.  Is the orange any better?



I find the orange a good bit better, thanks.


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## Nonlethal Force

I also like the new icons.  I didn't care for the red, but like the orange much better.  But I also really liked the old menu bar.  The words in the icons are too hard to read.  But I like them larger and below the menu bar on the front page!


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## Thanee

Morrus said:


> I can't work out how to do it with just borders around the cells on mouseover, so I tried changing the colour to one a little lighter.  Is the orange any better?




You could just swap the icons out for other icons (i.e. the same icons with pretty borders ) using the onmouseover/-out event-handlers and "getElementById('<ID>').src='<IMG-URL>'" or in that simple case even "this.src='<IMG-URL>'".

Bye
Thanee


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## Morrus

Thanee said:


> You could just swap the icons out for other icons (i.e. the same icons with pretty borders ) using the onmouseover/-out event-handlers and "getElementById('<ID>').src='<IMG-URL>'" or in that simple case even "this.src='<IMG-URL>'".




OK, you just cause a slap-my-own-forehead moment.  Yeah, the border doesn't have to be the cell border, it can just as easily be part of the image.  Why that didn't occur to me (and why I spent hours trying to figure out how to do it with the cell properties) is beyond me.

Sometimes I just can't see the wood for the trees.


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## Sammael

I have a couple of suggestions for the front page:

(1) The horizontal navigation bar is not needed, clutters the page too much, and forces the main navigation down. 

(2) Pick a position for icon text and stick to it. Different text positions on different icons are not user-friendly (users generally expect the same type of information to be on the same position, not scattered).

(3) If possible, to make your own job easier, you should create the icons without text and then add the actual text into the webpage itself. It makes maintenance much easier.

(4) I would personally get rid of the descriptions below each category. All categories are self-explanatory, except for "Gamers" (which can be renamed "Seeking Gamers"). Descriptions can be displayed as tool tips (or you can make a side bar on the right side which would display the descriptions onMouseOver).

(5) onMouseOver background color does not provide enough contrast with the white text. If you get rid of the text, it's not such a big problem, but I personally prefer much subtler onMouseOver effects. For example:

http://www.asp.rs/nikola/enworld.html

(incidentally, you can view source in that page to see how to set up a css class to handle your background-changing and such; I'm using a 2x2 px image with 2 solid and 2 transparent pixels myself, but I could have just as easily added borders to the cell...)


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## Angel Tarragon

Its still a little bright in my opinion. Maybe a dark blue would fit the bill.


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## Deset Gled

I'm not a huge fan of the icons, but I'm not upset about them, either.  The fact that they're not in stealth mode (except for the main page) is a key factor in this.


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## quindia

Glad most of you like the icons - some of them were a challenge to fit everything I wanted into such a small space, but they were fun to do.

Thanks to Russ for the chance to contribute to a site I visit every day!


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## Thanee

Yep, the big ones on the front page are very nice. 

As for the smaller ones... let's say I vastly prefer the site to look clean like this.

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Bye
Thanee


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