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    • 3 Themes!

    Posted by Orkz on Tue 30 of Oct, 2007 18:32 GMT-0000 posts: 6

    Hi there!

    I am running a portal for my role-playing game, and since it's a universal game, I have people that are more into Fantasy, people that are more into SciFi and others that want something they can read well.

    The "read well" theme could be any theme with good contrast, but i got a sugestion for all 3 of them:

    SciFi:
    Background black, sprinkled stars. Foreground: transparent red glass plate, you can see the stars through. Boxes: Thick plates of dark red crystal, text in bright red letters, like "glowing inside the crystal".
    Top of the Theme could be a Menu that looks like Starship controls, and an elipsoid window with a flash / animated gif that shows the view out of the spacecraft onto a planet, where small spaceships start or land now and then.

    Fantasy:
    Similar to SciFi in distribution of elements, but other color sceme: Light gray marble stone, the boxes as Tablets of stone, or etched into the stone with a nice shadow effect. Text inside the boxes as etched script cut into the stone.
    Top of the Theme could be a view outsie a cave, onto a city or vulcano, smoke drifting up, a dragon circling around, etc. basically the fantasy equivalent of the scifi thingy-menue.

    ReadWell:
    Background a wooden table, main box tractor-feed paper in bright white, with dark black, system font. Boxes at the side as post-it stickers.
    Top of the Theme could be a scanned or drawn dot matrix printer, navigation buttons as buttons on the printer.

    If you are interested in helping me with one or all of these ideas, please let me know. I will open an extra threat for each Theme and would upload my (unproffesional) PSD files, that would for sure look a lot better when done by a pro.

    Any help welcome!

    Reads: 16219
    Posted by Gary Cunningham-Lee on Fri 02 of Nov, 2007 03:06 GMT-0000 posts: 254 Japan

    Hi Orkz,

    I'll be happy to help. I don't have a lot of time for actually working on the files, etc., but I've done quite a few themes and have ideas about ways to do things, which could be helpful. Why don't you go ahead and start the threads, make file galleries for the files, or make wiki pages here or whatever else you like. Probably other people could benefit from this, too.

    I have a partly-finished Tiki version of Omkra Startrek Blue (GPL license) that could be used in some way, maybe. This is a fairly standard "portal" kind of theme with a black sky of twinkling stars, and the module boxes, article/wiki page boxes have blue glassy title bars. Of course your graphic ideas could be used instead, or some mix maybe.

    -- Gary


    Posted by Orkz on Sat 03 of Nov, 2007 13:11 GMT-0000 posts: 6

    I do like the StarTrek blue, but since my game got a scifi setting that's not starTrek, I'd not like to call it that or add an NCC-1701 to the main screen. But this theme is almost what i was looking for.

    I uploaded an example image of what i would assemble the SciFi theme from. The space with stars is the page background, the main page is placed onto the light red semi-transparent, menu boxes, ect. are red and have "glowing" text inside. The image looks crude, because i am no artist and usualy use Photoshop only for scientific purpose, but i guess the idea can be understood. We would need someone to re-make the plates of red crystal, but i guess my stars background is good enough.

    What pictures would you need to generate a theme? Things like lower_left.jpg and upper_right.jpg I could get a friend of mine to do professional graphics and cut it for you, so you just have to adjust the style and pzuule it together into a page?

    SciFiBoxExample.jpg (139.75 Kb)

    Posted by orkz on Mon 21 of Jan, 2008 03:27 GMT-0000 posts: 6

    Update!

    Tried to make another Photoshop image myself... left side only layout... comments in white. Hope it can be understood... the idea behind it... looks similar to matix but red and harder... maybe make the glass slides more crystal like.

    urpgscifi Kopie.jpg (112.54 Kb)

    Posted by orkz on Tue 22 of Jan, 2008 02:24 GMT-0000 posts: 6

    Here is the idea for "good readability and overview":

    Main navigation menu as clickable LED on a printer, side modules as post-it papers and main content on endless paper...

    urpgprinter.gif (63.14 Kb)

    Posted by orkz on Tue 22 of Jan, 2008 02:26 GMT-0000 posts: 6
    I guess you could start working on a theme, once the photoshop template is 100% as it should be later on? Let me know what else needs to be done... ❓
    Posted by Gary Cunningham-Lee on Wed 23 of Jan, 2008 05:44 GMT-0000 posts: 254 Japan
    I guess you could start working on a theme, once the photoshop template is 100% as it should be later on? Let me know what else needs to be done... ❓


    The problem is that these images are still rather far from what the themes themselves will look like. For example, in the theme, text styling is limited to what the user's browser is capable of. Text images can be used instead of actual displayed text for such things as headings, but in a CMS like Tiki, it's best to use actual text rather than text images for just about everything, because of the content being dynamic and multi-language. This means the text in your images won't be rendered as shown but instead will be text produced by the user's operating system and browser.

    Also, the layout in the images isn't clear, in terms of what in the images needs to go into which of Tiki's page divs, etc. A Photoshop (or other image program) file to base a theme on needs to be basically a pixel-perfect representation of the final page, like a screenshot. This can be sliced up and the parts used for HTML background images and so on.

    Themes could be made that are "inspired by" your images, but a lot of interpretation (that is, extra thinking by the theme maker) would be needed to get from those images to the finished theme. This could be an interesting project, but personally I don't have the time right now to do that (Tiki 1.10 is coming out soon and there is a lot of work to do to upgrade existing themes and so on).

    If you could get the images closer to what the finished theme will look like (and no need for text labels, just the actual image components themselves, with any needed descriptions not part of the image file), that would make doing the theme a lot easier. Maybe by that time in the future my schedule won't be so full, also.

    -- Gary