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  #1  
Old Jul 13, 2009, 04:26 PM
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quintin3265 quintin3265 is offline
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Default Site appearance suggestions

I've been talking to some people who believe that remixSite's visual appearance is not as impressive as its codebase. In particular, some have said that the images and logos are not as great as they could be. While I agree that there could be improvement in the interface, nobody has suggested exactly what improvements they would make?

Do you believe that the site's visual design could be improved? More importantly, what changes would you make to improve it?
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  #2  
Old Jul 14, 2009, 07:20 PM
TenchuX TenchuX is offline
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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.
  #3  
Old Jul 14, 2009, 07:23 PM
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The lowercase "r" at the beginning of the logo has to go, dude. And you might want to consider using traditional videogame colours like red (Nintendo), blue (Sega and Sony) and green (Microsoft) for the logo's colours instead of the pink and yellow.
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  #4  
Old Jul 15, 2009, 06:11 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by TenchuX View Post
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.

-----------------

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.
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Last edited by quintin3265; Jul 15, 2009 at 07:39 AM.
  #5  
Old Jul 17, 2009, 04:50 AM
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Default Updated design

Thanks to FireSlash from Overclocked ReMix, as well as you two and shawnphase, I made some changes to the site. I'm not quite finished yet, but I released what I have, and you can take a look now.
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  #6  
Old Jul 17, 2009, 02:12 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by TenchuX View Post
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.

I seriously hope you're just trolling there.

quintin, I think the easiest fix you can make with the logo is having the background color match the background color of the site. This logo has a white background, and the site has a light gray background.

If there's ever a way to improve the visual design of a site, it's making things look consistent.
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Old Jul 18, 2009, 04:33 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by TenchuX View Post
Please no. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooooooooo.............. .

Quote:
Originally Posted by quintin3265 View Post
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?
I would replace it with a flying Zangief, just like I said in the shizz forums.

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  #8  
Old Jul 20, 2009, 06:09 AM
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At your suggestion, I made yet another version of the logo at http://68.63.160.49/frontend_dev.php. You can take a look and see whether you like the transparency better. Unfortunately, the existing logo used a non-layered raster image and I could not make it transparent easily.

Hopefully everyone will like this one better. If not, I think I might just have to pick something and stay with it. Logos and colors are two things where it's probably not possible to please everyone, and there are likely people who are not replying here who love the current design. These people wouldn't see any reason to post because they have no complaints.
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  #9  
Old Jul 21, 2009, 07:42 AM
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This latest circular one wouldn't scale well at all, and doesn't really say "video game music" to me... except maybe in a Gyruss sort of way.

But I like that you're working the musical element into the logo itself versus fading it into the background. Have you considered playing up the video game component by introducing some old school arcade styling? (see attached) You could also use some very generic arcade-looking characters. (a spaceship, an alien, etc)
Attached Images
File Type: gif remixsite.gif (2.0 KB, 4 views)

Last edited by Junker; Jul 21, 2009 at 08:03 AM.
  #10  
Old Jul 21, 2009, 09:59 AM
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I like the new logo. Like Junker said, you may want to make it involve VGM more, but it's a big step in the right direction.
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  #11  
Old Jul 21, 2009, 05:13 PM
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The changes are now live in production. Since everyone thought this logo was better, I thought I would keep it, at least for now.

I also made about 20 other changes that various people suggested. The search bars are at the top of the boxes now, certain things are removed/bigger, and I fixed two showstopper bugs. Three beta testers weren't able to find any major bugs preventing song submission or downloading, although there's one song that suffered corruption I have to delete later night (that won't happen again).

I was thinking of making this site have a more "classy" look as opposed to the majority of VGM sites that have classic characters in them. The idea is to make game music look like a work of art, whereas the pixelated images seem in a way to "dumb down" the music. Today's beautifully orchestrated tracks don't really fit the pixelated theme, right?
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  #12  
Old Jul 26, 2009, 05:41 PM
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I have a few things I could mention. I don't like how you have that huge logo in the front page. When I go to a website I don't want to instantly have to scroll down because of a logo. It takes away from what is important and the main focus of the site, music. The logo is not that important.

Also, another thing, not about the way the site looks, but again about size. This time, the size of that remixsite signature you have right now. It's pretty big.
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