Help with button graphics

[John Cooper]

Hey guys,
Anyone good with graphic tools? I ran out of time today and wasn't able to figure out how to make the graphic buttons look good over a dark background. I posted the imageset in this thread:
http://www.planetz.com/forums/viewtopic ... 10&t=25500

If someone can run these through a batch-modification to fix their edges, please let me know - that'd be great.

If not, it'll look bad until I figure it out in Gimp

Thanks
John

[dawman]

Sorry I barely can get off an email, but just wanted to thank you for all of the work you do for us here at the Z.

Sincerely For Once ,



JimmyV.

[alfonso]

Sorry John, I can't help, but if you could address another issue it would be great....The red fonts on the new beautiful dark look are completely unreadable for me. I have a medium degree of "Daltonism" that is a sort of red-green color blindness, the combination of these two colors makes troubles. It is also related to the components of the complex colors, so, for example, the current name of the poster is just an almost invisible long red spot. I have to mouse select the name to see it highlighted. Bear in mind that at least the 15% of the males have this visual issue. Well if this is not for all the posters but only for you it's not a drama.

Regarding the buttons, why don't you make only the bell visible? Sleeker and more elegant, could it be that making the button's background the same color of the page background solves this issue too? Those big white balls are not that pleasant.

Anyway, thanks for your great site, this can never be said enough!

[spacef]

I could try to give a hand next week (not this week end unfortunately, i will not be available much).

I've seen phpBB3 also allows to hve a different icon for each forum section ? this could be cool too

[Immanuel]

How about some custom PlanetZ buttons from some of our great 3rd party devs?

[spacef]

How about some custom PlanetZ buttons from some of our great 3rd party devs?

thanks for the intention but i think you can do it for the top sections only such as "noah" "xite" , "music" "devices" etc etc. not sure the threads allow that. Not sure it would look nice too at the end (it gives a different forum atmosphere too, just like it would if there were user avatars for exemple).

[Fede]

Don't know if I find time today, but it would be useful to have also old graphics to refer to, or to use as template, or is it intended to be a "contest" for something new?
btw, the new forum format seems very good, fresh and neat.

John, thanks for all you do for us!
Fede

[John Cooper]

Guys,

Some good ideas here.

Re: custom forum buttons. I don't see a way to do it, but it's a good idea. I'm not a good graphic designer, so I wouldn't be able to make new buttons.

Re: red text color. Yeah it sucks. I don't need my name to be in red, thanks very much! For some reason, they didn't use CSS for that- it's done somewhere else. Anyway, I'll find and fix it.

Re: the big white balls - you're right, the old buttons had dark backgrounds. I can't remember where I got these - i think one of our forum members fixed them up for us. I'll attach our old buttons here for reference.

No, it's not a contest, I was just hoping for a little help on fixing up the buttons. As I said, I'm not that good at graphic design.

Also, there's still lots of little tweaks to the theme that need to be done - like the orange-on-white "Tip" in the posting window, the red-on-green text, etc. I'll fix them as we go...

Cheers,
-John

[Fede]

old-new graphics, hope it helps... (edit: attachment icon reworked...)

cheers
Fede

[braincell]

See what you think of these. It's more difficult than it looks. The paperclip attachment icon needs to be totally redone. I'll get to more later.

[John Cooper]

old-new graphics, hope it helps... (edit: attachment icon reworked...)

cheers
Fede

Wow, great work! I just installed these and they look good (as you can see).

We might need a totally new attachment icon- this still looks goofy.

I guess the only stuff remaining is the "new topic"/"reply"/etc buttons, which brain is looking at. I realized that the old ones weren't in that zip, so here's another attachment. They've added some new ones though (as you can see in the "en" folder of the new images), so I'm not sure how easy it'll be to reproduce this style.

-John

[braincell]

Maybe I made reply and new topic a little too square around the edges?

I like the buttons you just put up. It's good with no reply and new topic button.

[John Cooper]

We might need a totally new attachment icon- this still looks goofy.

Oh, I just refreshed, and saw your new one. Looks ok, I guess. Not great, but much better than before.

Thanks again fede!
-John

[John Cooper]

Maybe I made reply and new topic a little too square around the edges?

I like the buttons you just put up.

Your ones look ok - but I think (as someone else pointed out), the white background doesn't look as good, compared to a dark background button...

It's good with no reply and new topic button.

That was a mistake actually. When I copied in fede's new ones, it lost all the main reply/topic buttons. Not much good without them, if you can't ever post

-John

[braincell]

I think it was text links. That looked good. Nice and simple.

[braincell]

I just noticed a flaw in IE 8 which I don't see in Firefox 3. Look below where it says "Display posts from previous: Sort by " In IE 8 it is orange on white and very difficult to read but in Firefox 3, it is orange on dark green.

[braincell]

I just noticed a flaw in IE 8 which I don't see in Firefox 3. Look below where it says "Display posts from previous: Sort by " In IE 8 it is orange on white and very difficult to read but in Firefox 3, it is orange on dark green, also it's the same thing where it says "tips".

[Warp69]

Here's a small test - it's just a draft.




Totally offtopic - I simply need more space for my PM's

[braincell]

I like the colors Warp69. That is really nice with the theme.

[John Cooper]

Here's a small test - it's just a draft.
Totally offtopic - I simply need more space for my PM's

Those look good Warp - nice colors. The older ones were rounder, and lower-case. I'll swap in those old ones for the main buttons - but as I mentioned, there's more other new buttons that we'll need to tweak.

More space, in terms of maximum # of pm's? How many would be enough? (I just bumped it to 200).

-John