Quote:
Originally Posted by TenchuX
To be honest a lot of the site looks like it was made in MS Paint.
The logo needs to tell a lot about the site. I made this just for the hell of it. You can use it if you want, but regardless, the current logo is really bad... I could make it in MS Word.
Aside from that... how you select music is a pain in the butt. It needs to be made far more easier and visible.
Look at sites like OCR, VGMix, Remix the Sauce... heck even places like Newgrounds and Soundclick.
The site needs a lot of work both artistically and from an ease of use standpoint. You need to assume everyone who visits your site is an idiot, and as such the layout needs to be presented in such a way that an idiot could get through it without much of an issue. |
Some of the site looks like it was made in MS Paint because some of it WAS made in MS Paint, or using the GIMP equivalent tools that MS Paint has
As to the logo you suggested, I like it and agree that a change is needed, but there are two minor issues. The first is that of color-blindness, which affects about 10% of the population. People with color-blindness will have difficulty reading the text that's directly on top of the changing colors, especially where the red and green are right next to each other. One way you could resolve that issue is to perhaps make a "cloud" effect around the letters, so that the edges of the letters have whitespace around them to make them more defined. The shadows under the letters don't have any effect.
The second issue is that there seems to be a consensus (with Another Toad, shawnphase, and some others) that the logo should contain some reference to a video game or to music. The problem with using game characters is that they are copyrighted, so perhaps a stylized note or keyboard or something like that should be added? The site is designed so that changing the logo can be done on the database end with no code changes, so I think it would be great to have a different logo. What do you think about the suggestions I made (and feel free to argue against them if you don't like them)? If you want to make a few changes and upload another logo, I can post it immediately.
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If you're still not exhausted after reading all that, I still need more specifics on what changes exactly should be made to the visual layout. I looked at those sites, but in some cases I noticed more similarities than differences. For example,
-OverClocked ReMix has the same grey colors and rounded corners, and even has the same menu interface at the top (this wasn't planned)
-Many of the site's features are a replacement for VGMix, which was by design, although I don't think VGMix is a good example to use here because VGMix is broken and unusable.
If you were given some code, and told to make changes to it, what exactly would you do? Bucky, for example, said he would delete the large massive banner on the front page. Would you do that, and if so, what would you replace it with? When you say there is a problem "selecting" songs, what would you change? Would you make the text larger, or would you change the size of the pictures? Are there specific places where it's possible for someone to accidentally do something they don't want to because they are "idiots?" I could make some changes that I assume are best, but without knowing exactly what the problem is, the end result could just end up worse.
Do you know of anyone who could perhaps design some images to add to the front page and to some of the static pages?
Hopefully you won't take this post as criticism of your suggestions. I'm just trying to get to the bottom and make a list of very specific tasks that need to be done in order to resolve some of the general interface issues you described.