The diffrent coloured links are great, but close to getting the site noisy.. but maybee thatis just the european anticolourlove coming through...
Easy enough to change... I'll do an alt here in a moment...
One Problem is the not constant use of the Red Springlogored and that switch to Halflifeorange... it is some sort of break... halfing the site into a constant red Enginepart and a orange modpart..
Actually, that's on purpose, to provide a strong visual break. Engine stuff and Mod / Game stuff should be clearly separated, imo, and I thought that was one of the strongest elements of RoflCopter's design entry.
There, with more-consistent color treatment of the break between News sections, and same-color treatment of primary button area. Personally, I like the use of different color, it gets the viewer's eye focused on that area first and foremost, but there's an example of how it could be changed.
Got bored, coded Roflcopter's design (no major changes other than the text). The banner is randomly chosen on load, but there are only two there for it to choose from at the moment because I'm lazy.
My personal preference lies with roflcopter's design.
Argh, your design is interesting in a number of areas, and has some nice specific elements, but I think it lacks general cohesion, especially when compared with roflcopter's design. Many images seem to be floating, with no clear correlation with one another, and seems to lack the completion and immediacy which roflcopter's design is able to convey very quickly.
Well, here's why I proceeded to finish the design. I liked RoflCopter's a lot, but it has some significant disadvantages:
1. RoflCopter's design is small, and cannot be scaled very well. On my screen, at 1600/1200, it takes up a tiny fraction of the available space. Today's viewers are going to be seeing stuff at a wide variety of resolutions, and the site should scale dynamically with the user's browser, not be locked to a size, imo.
2. It doesn't have the primary buttons displayed as prominently as I'd prefer. It's very important the viewers are immediately connected to, and directed to, the buttons. Moreover, based on the comments by my semi-random sample audience, it is quite clear there were too many buttons, so I cut it down to essentials.
3. The games are in tiny pictures, and can't have a lot of text beneath them. It's really hard to differentiate your products if you cannot do either.
4. I can add stuff like RSS feeds, polls, the latest posts on the Forum, etc., very easily to the sides of this thing, floating on their own frames without screwing around with the main design.
Basically, I built a more traditional, top-down design, heavy on visuals, but designed, as you put it, to "float". That's on purpose.
As annoyed as I am at gnome , it's a pretty cool site.
The change I would make is that the "spotlighted mod" text should be restricted to a simple font at about size 10 or 12 in a corner - currently it is a little too busy up there, I think.
Good attempt argh. I personally also like roflcopters design better. Like WZ says it seems to have more cohesion, while yours looks like the elements have been "stacked" on top of one another.
I'm not a fan of the bold red colour scheme used in Argh's attempt either, seems a bit overwhelming.
One thing I think would be worth considering is a space somewhere for video content such as trailers and other promotional videos. Many of the great features of spring and its mods can't be seen simply through screenshots. Examples: the awesome utilisation of physics in spring and the use of the various different camera modes. When someone looks at a short video clip and sees an entire map on a huge scale with units moving and fighting all over the place, they're likely to get the "wow" factor and be interested in seeing more.
I'm not a fan of the bold red colour scheme used in Argh's attempt either, seems a bit overwhelming.
Meh, it's AF's choice of colors there, I was simply sticking with it, for consistency's sake.
One thing I think would be worth considering is a space somewhere for video content such as trailers and other promotional videos.
That would best be done with a News section that allowed for such things. Again, that's where a design like RoflCopter's is going to have some problems- where's it going to go? Attached to a specific "mod focus" page? Listed as a "game"? With mine, you just make another News entry, and voila, it's posted, at the top of the News.
If RoflCopter wants to take a serious go at dealing with those kinds of issues, I'll be more than happy to declare that we have a clear victor.
I'm a little scared we're going to end up with a winning design that we can't do certain things with, and cannot change easily, though.
First for the Redesigned - sorry Argh i was wrong, the first one had the downloadbutton way more "jumping" into your eye. Sorry for you having to do a extraexample to get me to notice..
I like Arghs refinded Design more - there is only one flaw, the missing face. As a PR-Guy once explained to me, humans are (automatically) searching for faces in nearly every stuff they view (take clouds) - therefore the Comander in Roflcopters site was quite a Good thing, to get peopls Attention. Just go to a Gamestore, if you are still not convinced, and take a look on the Package - there is always some Kind of Hero/Creature/halfnakedBabe looking right into your Eyes. That´s why we should have those exchanging comanderpics, even if they are difficult to forge..
While I love roflcopters design, on a 1920 x 1200 screen it does look a little lost. The basic design needs to be kept but adjusted to fit more situations... not actully that hard to do as everything is still split on horizontals in his design.
Should we say, no final descions till the end of the weekend? No point rushing, weve had this site for, what 5 years? 5 days wont hurt.
::EDIT:: oh and he's rigth about the face thing...
, it's a pretty cool site.
