User blog:Brandon Rhea/A new look for Star Wars Fanon

Many of you guys have probably been following the news on Community Central about the new look for Wikia, which will be replacing the current default skin, Monaco, in about a month's time (Monobook, the pre-Monaco skin, will still be available as a personal option). If you haven't been following this news, you can read about it in the Wikia Staff Blog.

Now that we know a date for when the new look will be the default Wikia look (October 20, with Monaco being removed on November 3), it’s time we start discussing what we want our wiki’s skin to look like. Those of you who use Monaco now and have your preferences set to admin override know that our design is pretty boring...we’ve got basically all white, with a logo and a little background around the logo. That’s it. We’ve never really had a customized skin at all. Let’s use this as an opportunity to change that.

A proposal
I put together a possible Monaco skin, that we can use if you want to until Monaco is gone. If you like it, I can also use the new Wikia.css for the new skin to transition the Monaco design to the new look. It’s on a test wiki: here is the Main Page and here is an example of an article. You will need to use Monaco to see this. The current Monobook design on that wiki is what we currently have here on Star Wars Fanon for Monobook.

You’ll see how strikingly different that design is from our current one. The main page is transparent, with an image that fades to black to match up with a black background in the content space of the main page. The siderbar is gray with white text. Indeed, most of the text on the wiki is white, save for links really (yes, I know the text of the logo is hard to read&mdash;that’s being worked on). Additionally, the main page is fixed width (all pages on the new look will be fixed width).

The background of articles is also 10% transparent, so you can see the wiki’s background a bit from that. Like I mentioned above, the text is white. Currently it is not fixed width but, like I also mentioned above, articles will be fixed width in the new Wikia look. I also know the infobox needs to be fixed.

So, we could use something like this when we switch over to the new look, or we could try something new. That’s where the next section comes in.

Other ideas?
I like the design I came up with, but I’m not married to it. This wiki doesn’t belong to me, it belongs to everyone, so it’s up to everyone to chime in with their opinions on what the wiki should look like in the new look. I know some users like the design I came up with, but another user I talked to didn’t, because s/he felt that there are already too many dark wikis.

So, that’s what this post is also about, getting feedback on my design as well as input for what you would like the design to be, so we can all decide (a consensus track topic can be put up once we have a rough idea of what we're going with). Personally I think we should stick with transparency, at least on the main page. There are so many large background images we could choose from too. I find the Coruscant cityscape very appealing, but there are lots of other planetary backgrounds we can choose from too (Naboo springs to mind&mdash;very peaceful).

But, I don’t want to try to direct you guys in any one direction here. I’ll be the one making the skin, since I think I’m the only one of the active Fanoneers who knows enough about CSS to be able to the things that the new theme designer can’t, but like I said I want everyone to chime in here.

I’m looking forward to what everyone has to say! - Brandon Rhea  (talk) 22:52, October 1, 2010 (UTC)