Topic: CodeTown: Potential Redesign (Page 1 of 1)

As happens about ever 4 to 6 months I am thinking about redesigning codetown. I have spent some time in GIMP (which is definately not photo shop) working on a design that takes a lot from the mozilla.com website.

This site is still in really early stages (as I am just mocking it up) so any and all feedback (including a the design suck go home and don't try again) would be appreciated. This is the hardest part for me, I am able to turn most designs into a working page, and can do all the server-side coding easily, but doing the graphic design work does not come naturally.

Click the thumbnail for the larger image.



Dan @ Code Town

In general I think it's quite useable as a design, the colours are nice and seem to complement each other, but there is one thing I find offensive, the news section, I don't like the header, I think it's too flat looking, it's not just the choice of red, but also the design of the header, maybe a thin border around it would help. The red gradient inside the news content area fades to pink, and I'm not sure this complements the rest of the designs colours.

I understand that you'd want something that really highlights the news section, but perhaps try a bold green or (light)blue, different from codetown header at the top of the page.

Perhaps a bit more padding would be nice between your Warcraft header and the rest of the content.

Hope this helps!

Cheers,

I just came back to see if anyone replied to me, I wrote a bit of a critism the other day, I must have gotten distracted and never hit submit. I'll try to quickly rewrite it:

Basically, the onsite content and offsite links, looks a bit like google ads as its plain text surrounded by 'windowed' text. The news stands out a bit too much imho and doesnt tie in with the header section, I would suggest maybe designing the onsite/offsite text in the same way as the warcarft related part is, it ties well with your top header. Although I see your image is 640x480, I like that your accomodating the oldies and safemode bound, and it would probably look a good bit better spread out.

I agree with Blaise to an extent, the fact that it fades to pink is fine imho, but it does stand out a bit too much. (If the header had the same curve it would help I think) Why not have the news in the same colour, it's positioning is enough to seperate it and catch the eye, maybe a brighter or darker shade. It's more of a personal thing, but I like when sites stick to a stricter colour scheme, white blue and black with a splash of colour is a tried and tested scheme that works, and from the looks of codetown.org your someone who appreciates simplicity, not to be bad mouthing whats there at all, it works, it functional and its what really matters.

Using some crafty dhtml :P you could make all the section drop down with that nice blue gradient the warcraft section has, with either them all expanded or none if that paints a good picture or what im thinking.