Early preview and all, but it seems to me that it hits the worst possible combination of an overall convoluted and chaotic look, while the same time offering very little content with the huge pictures.

But maybe this is just the impression you get on a smaller laptop screen ;)

i Got the same fright from the iPad.:) like the scrolling text though.

I like that you've cleaned up the look of the header area by bringing the links and the logo into the same box.

The scrolling forum posts just make it take longer to see if there's any recent topics I'm interested in, and the motion draws attention away from the art. Also, I don't see any other way to get to the forum.

The animated previews are a good idea, but probably shouldn't be moving by default. Motion strongly draws the eye, making it difficult to focus on anything else. It would be way too much if all the previews on the page animated, and it's very possible that this could happen. Either a button to start the preview, or only having images animate when you hover over them would fix this.

The larger images are fantastic. I always though the old design had the previews too small. However, it's hard to see where one preview ends and another begins, especially when they have similar background colors. Adding a little margin would help a lot to make it feel less crowded and chaotic.

I'm not sure what the menu in the lower right corner is for. The icon is what's normally used when the header is hidden inside a drop down menu, but it seems to be the most recent site news instead. It's really kind of confusing.

It's super nice that the page fits on mobile screens.

Overall, I like the direction. With a few changes and a little polish it will be way better than the current site.

I personally dont see that much wrong with the current layout, maybe a bit of moving around maybe. scrolling banners i think would work well, i had a mess about with paint. :)

the bugs are the most problems i think, and some newer features.

you could have the animated gifs work on rollover 

you could have the banners all the way down with seperated categories, 2d,3d,fonts and music, music could have a Play all from the latest section that plays constanly whilst browsing the site, optional of coarse. im just throwing things out there now, hahaha

Sorry, but I have to agree with the previous reviews.

• Picture size is too large (and isn't aligned with description text).  maybe give people an "accessible" option that includes larger thumbs, but default size shouldn't really be any more than 200x200 (that might even be too big).
• I see two "Popular This Week" headings...they took up so much space I even notice pages were loading below them.  I'd recommend making that collapsable so people can minimize it.
• Like the scroll, but can you add an "opt-out"?  Check out Unity User Forums for an example: it allows you to close a headline/ticker announcement

Agree with everything that's been said, particularly chasersgaming and Boom Shaka. I don't really feel like there's anything wrong with the layout of the site right now---it seems like bugs and maintainability are a much bigger issue. Mobile responsiveness of some kind feels like it's missing from the current frontpage. 

That said, I like chasersgaming's mockup. Seems like now might be a good time to add a few niceties while focusing on cleaning up the backend. 

Also just want to say thank you so much for what you're doing, and for all of your efforts maintaining the site. It's thankless but much-needed.

I'm excited to hear OGA will be getting an update!

I like @chasergaming's design with the left-right scroll. I think it would be even better if you split up the latest art by categories, like you do on the "Latest Art" page. So instead of having 1 row for latest art, have 1 row for "Latest 2D art", another for "Latest 3D art", etc... Looking at amazon.com right now, that is similar to how they do it, where they have popular/featured content on top, then rows for different categories of products.

My thoughts on your numbered list:

1) I think starting the animation on hover would be great. It looks like a common way to achieve this is to have both a static and animated image, and use javascript to swap which one is displayed based on hover (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7473117/animating-a-gif-on-hover)

2) n/c

3) Using the 3-bars icon for news is a little confusing for me. Like @BenCreating says, I am used to that being a replacement for the top menu, especially in responsive websites, such that when the window is made too small to show the full top menu, it all gets hidden, and can be shown by clicking on that icon. It's not straightforward to use it for news.

4) I had never seen "Who's online" before, but I do look at the recent comments and recent forum posts whenever I visit the site, and would like that to be maintained somewhere easy to get to (prefereably not the scrolling marquee at the top).

5) I agree with all of this. I also really don't like how the previews span 100% of the window width, I really like having margins on the left and right, like is the case now. When I visit sites like amazon or youtube, they have pretty big borders that actually help me focus on the conent, rather than be overwhelmed like I am when I visit the new page now. (See point 8 for my thoughts on a left/right button)

6) I didn't really like the scrolling marquee, because I didn't want to have to wait to read all the recent posts/etc.

7) n/c

8) To help the layout be more uniform, I wonder if the upload page could have an image crop widget, such that the crop area has a fixed aspect ratio, but the user could position/enlarge/shrink it. That way previews whose proportions don't work well for the front landing page would all be cropped down (allowing the user to choose what part is shown), while the page for the actual submission would show the whole preview image. There could be some default crop for users that don't set it themselves. I don't think this would work well with the left/right buttons you propose in point 5 though, unless he user picks a crop for EVERY preview image they upload. It also might not work well with future site layouts, where you want to change the aspect ratio of preview images on the landing page.

@botanic, yes I get that buddy, but I didn't want to take anything away from the mock up, but your quite right, more art. So how about having the comments,forum comments,leaderboards favourite submitters etc 'tabbed' in a side bar?, a sidebar that is closable or appears on rollover.art images could be expanded on rollover to 'full size' and play animation if it has one, now 'full size' would ultimately be whatever size the upload was/is? If image sizes are problematic then it may be a suggestion that OGA has a restriction in place for preview images, now I don't actually like that idea, I hate having to resize images to fit a restriction, but if it can be automated like it is now then it shouldn't be to much of a problem, everywhere else has a recommendation, maybe that would be better to best showcase the art and keep OGA consistently looking. Rollover seems to be my favourite word,Hahaha, why I like about rollover experiances is it keeps thing simple and tidy without losing the information, it's there you just have to move the mouse, or in terms of mobile friendly, a finger touch away and is totally a user optional feature whether they want to see the information,or just look at the art.

i like the banner scrolling and I would maybe prefer the catagorys separated like @Dezradragons suggests.

sorry, I do waffle on sometimes, :)

Riff on @chasersgaming's design with tips from @DezrasDragons. Mostly non-functional so probably not useful. That said maybe you guys can make some of it out. version with no shadows here.

Haha! I kept trying to zoom in on that mockup, pistachio.

I like that mockup. Personally, I think no left sidebar as shown in chaser's example is slightly better; one of the main problems the current layout has IMO is not enough room to show off the art. We have 3 fairly important categories (popular this week, newest art, and featured art) but only the first two can be seen without scrolling around, and only 8 at most in each category are visible. The more room there is to show off art, the better IMO. 

After looking at these mockups, I do think one sidebar to show stuff like recent posts, popular collections, etc is a good thing if we can fit it. 

@Botanic. Didn't mean to leave all of this on you. I'm just getting back to a point where I can dig into that stuff and help out. :)

Moving pictures on hover like on porn sites.

@Botanic: you commited in git as "root"

What I would like to see: (not design; totally overkill)

• WebGL preview for 3D art
• Integrated character generator if submission, which have the right format ... maybe even for collections
• Better player for sounds
• Submission dependencies for better attribution generation (this is based on submission X and X is based on Y and Z)
• Unicode /o\

I do not really care for the frontpage, but maybe it would be nice to customize it with filters.

I only care for 2D and I guess some are more into 3D.

Maybe pinning searches to the front.

I don't know how to describe it, but the design makes it hard to focus. I think it would look good with a menu/title that is easier to distinguish from the art content (different background colors or something) and one side bar that can kind of condense the important parts from the current two sidebar design. I like the banner idea that chasersgaming mentioned for the art categories where the user can scroll left and right. If there would be animated previews, please only allow it when hovering over it.

Thanks for taking the time to make a preview and letting us give feedback!

I like it, but I think the images are a bit too big. I also don't think that the previews fit in, they should have a border to look nicer. Just my opinion!

It has nothing to do with your laptop because it also looks like a complete nighmare on a 1080p 39" monitor. It looks like something optimized for mobile devices except no one is developing directly on those unless you count an RPi3, which then you're running it like a desktop, so I don't understand the point. I wish people would stop trying to fix things that were never broke. It's just going to be like Reddit in which people prefer the older interface. I think the current look is perfect. I smell a young web dev trying to sneak in some kind of JS tracking nightmare. If that happens, I'm not going to bother wasting my time learning a new interface after experiencing the ease of what we already have. There's a reason DeviantArt still looks the same as it did 10 years ago; "Keep It Simple Stupid" and don't fix it if it's not broke.

Also, maybe instead of adding complicated 3D previewing features, people could just upload a model to Sketchfab and then embed it here but it seems as though OpenGameArt blocks iframes.

@TheOuterLinux Some of this, I agree with. The JS, I'm with you on that. Without going into why, a lot of the web is a bloated dependency nightmare and this current mockup hits most or all of those bad notes.

Unfortunately "if it ain't broke" is generally not applying to high tech/web design, or some modern industry like this. Everything moves fast and if you don't fix it they break you eventually. I have no idea how DA is still hanging on, probably it had most changes under the hood. Also in fact parts of the current interface could be a hell of a lot simpler. Most of it works, some of it doesn't. Points there have already been raised, and I tried to bring some of those here in my mockup.

Mine so far are pretty wide reaching. Better organization of categories (user, news etc), put that in a hierarchy. In my mock I think I tried to put the social networking buttons with email/IRC as example. Who's Online probably goes in the forum. But when you group things like that there's more room to put art and its stats in your face.

Devs! I don't know how you're implementing this but don't make it a bloated dependency nightmare, code tight.

@MedicineStorm Years of pushing small-ass pixels on sub-HD displays will do that to a man.
I'll probably make one for info page or user page, but waaay down the line. Zoom in on that.

TheOuterLinux: "don't fix it if it's not broke."

It is broken. That's why we're doing this. I'm guessing your recommendation is 'I prefer the new layout to be as much like the current layout as possible'? That could be useful feedback. Are you saying there is nothing about the current layout you would change? Keep in mind this isn't an adjustment to the current layout, it's a replacement; It's possible (although more difficult)  to replace the current layout with a layout that is nearly identical, but the site code has to change either way. New layout features are easy to make now, and not as easy later.

I might actually have a go at this Drupal and experiment with an OGA mock up type thing, and see if I can get anything to work.if there are no objections? Won't effect anything here, just so you know.

I'd just like to request that everyone keep the feedback positive and constructive. Botanic (and MedicineStorm, and so on) is doing this for free, as a hobby. They are trying to fix a system which is becoming difficult to maintain. That maintenance is necessary to keep this amazing resource available. Let's remember that OGA benefits us all and most of us don't pay for it, so the least we can do is be courteous to those who are trying to take care of it. 

Thanks to everyone!

I want to vote for Basto's idea about submission dependencies. It would be REALLY great to explicitly track which submissions/works a submission is derived from; this could help automatically generate attributions (like with a collection, but you could "follow" the graph of attributions to identify all the works a given submission borrows from), and also to check for license compatibility. 

Hi, I just checked and I find it confusing and a bit chaotic :(.

I think we should focus on a simple clear landing page, to add constructive criticisim I made a quick concept in inkscape of what it could be

https://opengameart.org/content/concept-for-open-game-art