Preliminary mockup of main page
Monday, July 12, 2010 - 22:12
Here's the link:
http://oga2.opengameart.org/mockup1/
At the moment, I'm lifting blocks and such from the main site. Note that this is nowhere near set in stone -- I'm just playing around with tightening up the layout. Still to do are the blog post, the list of favorites, affiliates, etc. In the meantime, I thought people might want to take a look. :)
Warning: This has not been tested in anything other than Firefox 3.6. It makes use of some fancy new markup (namely @font-face) so it won't look exactly as intended in all browsers. I'll post a screenshot ASAP.
Bart
Looks rather cool ;)
The news/blog could be a relatively small headline part above the art submissions, which could be extended by clicking on it.
--
http://freegamedev.net
Looks rather good for an early mockup. And it works fine in Fx 3.5 as well, as far as I can tell.
My impressions...
Logo is just simple text... too simple. Hopefully you're going to be doing something special with it.
Login form needs some touching up. Maybe make the background color dark like the button.
I don't like the navigation bar background color changing. It seems... wrong.
I like the color scheme overall, and the "DeviantArt" feel it has. Looking forward to seeing more.
Oh, and there is going to be a featured consistency set sort of thing on the home page, right?
Robin: Featured collections, for instance? I hadn't considered that, but it's a very good idea. Tentatively, yes.
Yes, that. It would really make for ease of navigation and exploration.
Good news everyone!
The mockup renders correctly on the latest versions of Chrome (5), Safari, and Opera! Perhaps unsurprisingly, it doesn't render correctly on IE 8, which doesn't support rgba(...) colors or @font-face.
I'm pretty sure the current version of OGA works relatively well on IE6, although it's likely that this will no longer be the case when 2.0 goes live. I can't promise I'll support IE7 either. As for IE8, I'll make sure everything is functional, but I'm not going to spend extra time to make certain that the theming matches exactly. At ay rate, compatibility hacks have to come last, and the design is still in a very early stage.
It seems it renders correctly in Midori too (WebKit).
WIP version 2 of the mockup is here. I'll post a message when I've finalized it.
http://oga2.opengameart.org/mockup2/
I've had two suggestions on the menu bar: Either make the whole thing one color, or separate it so that the color separation is meaningful. I'll be doing one of those things, but I haven't yet. :)
The button font will probably need to be changed.
Hi all,
Newbie here. Neither a developer nor an artist but a fanboy of both. What I would like to see is a planetplanet integrated so one can read all the good things the developers and artists are thinking/finding/ have issues about . The whole zigbag.
Little history of planetplanet
http://www.planetplanet.org/
The latest development is of Venus :-
https://edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/planet-venus
Some developers/artists whose blogs I read :-
http://nicubunu.blogspot.com/
http://grumbel.blogspot.com/
Read this one specifically :-
http://grumbel.blogspot.com/2005/11/beyond-polycount.html
I am sure there are many more talented artists and developers who are making/contributing to FOSS games but because there are scattered, users/casual gamers like me don't come to know about the issues they are facing.
I regularly do read freegamer.blogspot.com as well as happypenguin.org but they are more result-oriented blogs rather than process-oriented which is what I'm interested in.
Just my 2 paise.
Yes maybe a developer blog part, for interested artists would be nice. I guess I would not use it, but why not?
Oh and what about a mini tutorial section? Could be a funny contest also, e.g. make a short tutorial about some specific part of game art creation.
But maybe that would also bloat the site too much... staying on focus is not a bad thing at all ;)
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http://freegamedev.net
Regarding game planets, I think http://planet.freegamedev.net fills that need pretty nicely. OGA could do without it, but if there's a nice place to put it in, you could add a little feed later which feeds off from that planet. But this should not be too prominent, and should wait until the rest is in place, IMHO.
One of the things you should do is have personalization built-in. In this page I don't see my name anywhere so its tough to know whether I have signed-in properly or not. I'm using openID for signing i.
I like the design, but the empty space on the right bugs me. Is that just part of the mockup, or would that be an actual issue?
@shirish: When you're logged in, the login and password boxes will be replaced with a link to your user profile and a way to log out.
@Redshrike: Good question. I like the two-color thing, but the issue there is that in order to have two colors, I have to split the page at some fixed distance from the left edge. A lot of pages have content that's a fixed with (960 pixels is common) and that content is centered on the screen so that the margins on both sides are equal, and that's most likely what you're used to seeing. The other possibility is I could have a semi-fluid layout, where the right column expands to the width of the screen. The problem with those is that they're more of a pain to implement.
I could probably accomplish a fluid layout with javascript, but my instict is to avoid having a page style that depends on javascript. Maybe I should re-evaluate that. I'll give it some thought.
Bart
Already mentioned, but I agree the button font doesn't fit well.
Also, the bar with the links could be its own colour, not transparent as it is now (for the background to show through). This way it will appear as a stronger element (not subordinate to the background)
The text in the side bar should be equally alligned. Right now the text under "recent forum activity" is too much towards the right.
Blue and white are nice colour and the mockup doesn't look bad. But perhaps it could be enhanced by adding one additional colour to bring some more life to the design. Something strong (like orange) but in limited places, so it doesn't throw the colour scheme off balance. I made some mockup modification where I threw around different ideas. Perhaps they can be of some use.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1482587/OGA/mockup_green.png
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1482587/OGA/mockup_orange.png
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1482587/OGA/mockup_orange_tango.png
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1482587/OGA/mockup_yellow.png
Regards,
Lamoot
Yep the orange one looks really cool!
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http://freegamedev.net
Ooh, the yellow one looks really nice. I like yellow! :D
I do know of planet.freegamedev.net and while no doubt its a nice planet, it doesn't take into account artists who might not be part of a project but contributing occasionally. For e.g. both the bloggers nicubunu and grumbel, artists whom I have highlighted who use extensively FOSS tools for their animation/drawing etc. are not in those as they do not contribute to a game or part of projects extensively. But these guys need to have more exposure as they bring creativity and good solutions and ideas to art creation as a whole.
While I do applaud your idea of having a feed from freegamedev.net that solution+ digital artists using FOSS tools would be a great asset. If they are exposed more (as in their blog posts) they are more likely to contribute further to the database or to specific projects.
Just my 2 paise.
You have very valid and strong points. But where do we get the artist feed from? As far as I know, there aren't any prominent art planet which takes all art assets. There are specialized ones, like http://planet.linuxmusicians.com/ but as you see, it's meant for linux musicians and not (F)OSS art of all types.
It'd be cool to find and use something like that. :)
I can set up an artist feed myself if I know what artists to include.
@Lamoot: Cool idea. I like the orange accent color the best -- I think because it contrasts well with the blue.
Cool :)
In addition to adding some orange, another thing to really bring the design to life is a proper logo where it says "OpenGameArt.org" or perhaps a more interesting version of the current text.
> In addition to adding some orange, another thing to really bring the design to life is a proper logo where it says "OpenGameArt.org" or perhaps a more interesting version of the current text.
We could do a Weekly Challenge for that? :)
I whipped up some different samples of a very simple logo for OGA, but from chatting with Bart in IRC, he sounded pretty adamant about sticking to HTML5 for as much as possible and eliminating almost all of the bitmapped graphics, so that he could make changes to the site without hitting Photoshop. I could be mistaken, but that's the impression I got.
Here are the samples I made. I'm using an Open Source font:
http://jim8.com/pics/OpenGameArt-org-logo1.png
Well, if bit-mapped graphics is to be avoided, aren't there any SVG gurus around who could make something there?
Though I guess opening and editing a SVG file might not be that much more easier.
I'm okay with using a bitmap for the logo. My problem with the logos was the form factor. I want something fairly wide, but not particularly tall (the current logo image is 359x31). I was considering using small caps instead of lowercase, which should allow me to slim it down a bit more.
What I want to avoid is having to use images for button fonts, headings, and the like. Unfortunately, this most likely means I'll have to move away from Orbitron on things other than the title, because Windows (XP at least) doesn't render it very well at small sizes.
(Addendum: Just solved the Orbitron issue. I switched from Orbitron Medium to Orbitron Light for headings, and now the letters on XP are spaced correctly. On Linux, they're thinner, but I think they still look good.)
http://oga2.opengameart.org/mockup2/
Remember to shift-refresh to force reload the stylesheet.
> I whipped up some different samples of a very simple logo for OGA
I especially like the bordered one, the one that's indented the most.
> Just solved the Orbitron issue. I switched from Orbitron Medium to Orbitron Light for headings, and now the letters on XP are spaced correctly. On Linux, they're thinner, but I think they still look good.
The font for the buttons is still a bit large, IMHO.
BTW, why did you change the login stuff to be right-aligned? It looks a bit off to me.
I'm actaully tweaking the page layout at the moment. I'm doing a few javascript tricks to make the right side of the page elastic, just for kicks. It's not quite there yet. I'll post as soon as it is.
Bart
Here we go:
http://oga2.opengameart.org/mockup2/
The mockup isn't done yet, but the layout part is fixed. Theoretically, I'd like to show/hide additional previews based on how wide the preview boxes are, but I'll mess with that later.
@bart . Even if you start up with the ones I mentioned in the thread above, that would be a start. I could find artists/developers who are either doing things worthwhile with the tools or making changes or making content using it. I could either share the details on this thread or some other thread or by mail depending on how you want to play it.
Are you thinking of using some professional bb forum software with drupal? While I do like the forum it seems/feels quite incomplete.
Could you also have a search by keywords on the forum. Sometimes you see some posts and want to investigate later but don't remember the whole thing. Right now this cannot be done I think or I haven't found a way to search through the forums.
you could also think of having a good board like punbb (lightweight forum software) or something else altogether combined with the site. That would make the forum lot more functional than it is atm.
Again my 2 paise.
I like it, it has a very smooth feel to the whole thing. But I do have a few questions.
1:) Where would the little box that tells you who's online go?
2:) Might we want to put a border around each section of different art?
3:) What about a little box that says your current info, like medals, points and what you've submitted, like an account summery?
Also find me on RPG Toolkit <a href="http://rpgtoolkit.net/member/vwolfdog/">here</a href>.
Greets! :)
1) The boxes are just preliminary placeholders. The Who's Online box will return. :)
2) There's a dark, translucent box around each art section. Are you seeing it? If not, what browser (including version) and OS are you using?
3) That will be back too. :)
:) Thanks. It's looking great!
Also find me on RPG Toolkit <a href="http://rpgtoolkit.net/member/vwolfdog/">here</a href>.
Hi bart, good job, great project. =)
I approached some suggestions. Perhaps the large typography works, but not in small text. You might want to take a look at the typography droid.
I think that the typhography "orbitron" isn't working good in lowbody text, maybe yes for a logo, but not in paragraph text.
Cheers =)
Click on the image.
Can you give me a link to this "droid" font? Mostly I get fonts for Android when I google it.
hi bart, here is where you can find the font http://code.google.com/webfonts, is one of the list.
http://code.google.com/webfonts/family?family=Droid+Sans&subset=latin
cheers =)
Why Droid Sans and not, say, Liberation Sans or some other, similar font?
I didn't work with Liberation sans, i don't know that font, use whatever you want, while it can be easyly readed. i was just making you a suggestion with Droid. If you use another font, that will be fine for me. Because i'm not trying to be the creative, that will be your pleassure. And i.. while i can, will help you, to correct some little things like readability or organization on the screen.
So if i can help you, let me know.
I sent you a big to you my friend. Keep in this good way.
PD: i hope that i expressed myself correctly.