Question Re: Background Textures and palette adjustment

I'm answering here because I'm not allowed to reply to Kristin's original post. Answer follows:

Er, what? I guess the change is pretty subtle. OK, maybe I'm noticing a little more contrast between the several areas, and I don't remember if those subtle gradients were already in the menu bars before... but if Kristin hadn't posted about it, I don't think I would have noticed the change on a conscious level.

EDIT: fuggetall I wrote above, after a page reload it suddenly changed to the new look. Not crazy about the "old masonry" texture, and the contrast with the topic icons is pretty low. Not crazy about the dark brown forum main menu either.

Original digression about my inability to notice subtle differences in color kept below for the humorous value.

Yeah, total cismale here. The number of colors I can name without checking a Pantone catalog is probably under a dozen, let's see... seven in the rainbow, OK, although "indigo" looks like "fancy blue" to me. Then there's magenta and cyan that I had to learn because of color separations for printing, and now are in ink cartridges too. Add brown, pink, beige, black, white, grey, and "purple" which for me is just another name for "violet", and I'm done. Yeah, I named 13 actual colors, but two of them are just alternate names because I can't tell them apart, so eleven. Actually, I might have to take magenta too, because it's pretty much the same as pink. And isn't cyan just light blue? Anywhere BUT in the context of printing tech, I would call those colors "pink" and "light blue." So, nine actual colors, four synonyms/shade variations, and three shades of monochrome. My initial estimate of "a dozen" was pretty much on the nose.

Oh, wait, there's one more, although I don't know what it would called in English. It's this ill-defined zone where green meets brown and grey, sorta natural dirty color. In Portuguese it's called "cor-de-burro-quando-foge," literally "the color of a donkey when it runs away" (a donkey is usually grey, when it runs away it will get dirty with mud and grass, so...) And no, I'm not making it up. According to a famous Brazilian writer, "cor-de-burro-quando-foge" is the correct answer to the question "What's the color of Napoleon's white horse?" (and no, I'm not making THAT up either).

I'm not sure the white text-shadow for .breadcrumb > li and .navbar .nav > li is a good idea. On the tan background for the breadcrumb navigation it's not a major deal, but against the dark brown for forum navigation above it the letters look like a stroked font that has the outer strokes set white and the innermost stroke black. That might give folks with visual impairments trouble, but those are also the folks most likely to override CSS.

Likewise, I'm not sure that having the pagination list elements (Start, First, 1, Next, End) still visible (white outlines showing where the boxes are, gray text) when disabled is helpful.

The gray text for X number topics (small.hidden-phone.nowrap) is hard to see against the new background. The Category folder icon and the feed icon also have too little contrast.

It hasnt made a huge difference on my laptop, but on my main PC it is very obvious.
To be honest, I dont like it; its darker and some of the text is a lot more difficult to read. Also, while pretty, the parchmenty effect is distracting.

Biggest issue for me is that the navigation/current location links are hard to read. Also, the band of white at the top of the graphic makes some text hard to read when the pattern repeats in long posts and stories. Additionally, you can see the repeat because the band is at the top, but doesn't blend to the bottom.

A few thoughts, in no particular order.

1. I think the gradient on div.navbar-inner (the forum navigation header) makes the menus a bit hard to read. I would prefer the same 'flat' color used on the 'Log out' button (button.btn.btn-primary), as that would give the menu a cleaner look.
2. The text in div.comments-policy (the comment policy disclaimer on story pages) is a bit hard to read. I think it would be more readable if the styling used in div.well._menu (the upper right navigation bar) was used.
3. The div.hr styling looks a bit off, though I'm not certain the best way to fix it. Perhaps if the diamond images were pallet-shifted to match the dark brown and the white bar was changed to transparent.

Over all, the restyle doesn't seem to be a regression. The 'div.Net' styling still works, and I'm not seeing the stray full-height menu bars that I've seen on occasion in the past.

I like the overall look, but forum posts really need a layer between them and the background like what the stories have.

Also, the top left corners of the post headers are still non-matching.

The cyan/green 'notification' boxes (for post edits and ect.) seem a little jarring when placed against the background. Also, the top of the page seems a bit cramped with the new image at the top. I'm unsure whether that space is meant for ads, since my browser seems to be allergic to showing ads. If not, that image could be replaced with a wider one, or otherwise some space-filling stuff could go there...? There seems to be a awful lot of dead space in the site design, which I now heavily suspect is because my bloody ad-blocker has turned itself on again. I'll rectify that now:

Oh wow.

I did NOT notice that parchment effect before I turned off my Adblock. Did...did an update just go through as I was reloading? Because I'm seeing it now, and I've turned my Adblock on again after noticing no ads in the dead space.

Oh, and I've also noticed that the title styles on the stories- especially the early Gen-1 ones- have disappeared on mobile. There's now a box around the story, and simple boldified text. It doesn't appear to be intentional, but that's my take on something I have no clue about.

Um...I'm going to have to agree with those against the parchment look here. It's a bit annoying. It might just be my ADHD, but I keep getting distracted by the white marks.

My eyes keep trying to see a forest in a sepia-tone photograph. Especially across the top behind the Crystal Hall logo. Like trying really hard to see a 3D mirage picture. I also have to say not a fan. Maybe a different source that looked more parchment, but less old/used? I dunno.

Regarding textures:
I don't know if it's possible within the constraints of the software, but I would leave it out of the main text boxes. Let's say, have a subtle texture for the site background, but a flat color (maybe slightly lighter than the main window bg texture) for the text boxes. Background textures tend to kill legibility.

I hate to complain, with all the good work you are doing for us, but I have to agree that I am not a fan of the new background. The texture looks kind of nice in the non-text areas, but it is a problem behind text and some buttons for those of us with less than perfect vision. While the story areas are better than the forum areas, even they are awkward in places.

CrazyMinh wrote: Oh wow.

I did NOT notice that parchment effect before I turned off my Adblock. Did...did an update just go through as I was reloading? Because I'm seeing it now, and I've turned my Adblock on again after noticing no ads in the dead space.

No, the update happened before this thread was created. You just didn't see it right away because of browser caching.

I have to agree that the texture behind text is sometimes hard to read. The more texture, the harder it is to read.

There is one spot that could use MORE texture: the big white bar at end of the "Index Recent Topics .... Help" menu is glaring. If nothing else, you could fill it with "Unused" or something.

The only major issue I personally have is that some previous stories (e.g. Gen 2 IDTWIKA) have section breaks as picture squiggles. The backgrounds of those images aren't picking up the texture, so they don't look aesthetically pleasing.

I'm not sure if the break-images already have transparency backgrounds or not.

I like the textures in all the menus, and while it took a few paragraphs, but I have no issue with the background for main story text.

Leaving aside the texture issue for now... I don't know if anybody else is having this issue, but the main menu bar at the top looks odd: the last button, the one with the user's picture, is sitting all alone in a second (otherwise blank) row, under a blank spot where it *should* be located.

Sir Lee wrote: Leaving aside the texture issue for now... I don't know if anybody else is having this issue, but the main menu bar at the top looks odd: the last button, the one with the user's picture, is sitting all alone in a second (otherwise blank) row, under a blank spot where it *should* be located.

Seems to be related to resizing. When I have my browser window at my normal size, it all fits in one row just fine. If I make the window a bit narrower, the avatar button drops down to a second row; so far so good, though it drops down just a little bit earlier than would be strictly necessary so that there's a narrow range of window widths where the button would have fit in the first row but ends up on the second instead (sounds like what you're seeing). If I make the window even narrower, so that other buttons have to wrap around into the second row, then the avatar button immediately goes onto a third row even though there's still tons of room in the second row.

The gap in the top navigation bar most likely comes from kunena.css setting a minimum width of 960px for #kunena.layout .navbar .nav (which is why browser screen width matters), but at a glance I'd say that the combined anchor text + margins runs just short of that. If Kristin is having to compile setup files to CSS, as mentioned, it would be a PITA to get that just right, and that still won't look right for folks using different fonts (because of OS or eyesight)

The dropdown list (class="nav pull-right") is different from the other boxes because it's meant to float right instead of floating left. So when the space available runs short, it's the first to drop (being rightmost) and then floats to the right of the space claimed for the wraparound. (It's actually doing what it's meant to do.)

Kristin, I'm sorry you feel unappreciated, and I'm sorry for my role in that. Thing is, not many of us know enough about the site's mechanics to offer solutions for perceived issues. I know a little bit of HTML and CSS (and practically no Javascript), but I didn't dig into Kunena to figure out what could be done. I thought I was helping in a debugging process, but evidently it came out as whiny complaints. That was not my intent, and I apologize.

Likewise, I apologize if I came across as an ungrateful wretch. Thank you for your efforts, and thank you for restoring the readability of the site.

Sometimes experiments work out the way that you want, sometimes they come out differently.

Please do not think that all of your hard work goes unappreciated.

You do an excellent job of keeping this place running.

Give us a shout in advance letting us know when you'll be testing the next set of changes.

I've found when dealing with software, more often it's the surprise, and not the actual changes that causes issues with acceptance.

Another approach would be to say, "i'm trying these changes. Can anyone tell me what they break?"

Either way, or a different way, please accept thanks from all of us for your work.