Thursday, July 12, 2007

I See a Red Door and I Want to Paint it Black

Relax. I'm not suggesting Charcoal as the final color theme for the forums. But I did want a dramatic contrast from the original color set.

This is a democracy, isn't it?
I also want to throw open the color design to all members. Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to bend your considerable collective skills to the task of proposing color themes for nuponuq (and eventually for "The Arena", or whatever it ultimately becomes). Do so by commenting on this article with your suggestions (more on how to do this below!). I'll take your suggested color themes and apply a new one every day or so for the enjoyment (and commentary) of the community. After a while we'll vote for our favorites and select a winner (Note: Schad will ultimately have veto power if he wants it).

How the hell do I create a color theme?
Many of you no doubt recall Ender's eye-searing foray into forum colorization a few weeks ago. If you were paying attention the next day, you may have seen my own attempts as well. The problem we were grappling with was the rather poor interface that the forum software has for managing colors. There's no effective way to preview color choice and so the only option we had was to pick colors that seemed like they might play well together and slam them into place in the live site. Chaos. For that reason I created a simple preview tool to dry run color themes. You can find the tool here:

nuponuq color tool

You can play around with color combinations and see how they will work together in the forum. When you have a theme you like, simply copy the color values and paste them into a forum comment. That's all there is to it!

So let's get cracking!