Styling the wiki a bit

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Null

Null

Ooperator
kiwifarms.net
Joined
Nov 14, 2012
I'm doing the wiki a bit of service and changing its theme.

Tempted to add a comic background to the wiki as well. However, I think the stupid sonichu background we have is really iconic and sharing it with the wiki might make it less unique.

Any thoughts for a background? I'm tempted to do a comic montage with Sonichu, Assigned Male, Dobson comics, etc.
 
Null said:
I'm doing the wiki a bit of service and changing its theme.

Tempted to add a comic background to the wiki as well. However, I think the stupid sonichu background we have is really iconic and sharing it with the wiki might make it less unique.

Any thoughts for a background? I'm tempted to do a comic montage with Sonichu, Assigned Male, Dobson comics, etc.
Click to expand...

To celebrate the life and times of John W. Flynt you should make it Socially Unconscious comics
 
A comic montage with all of the scribblings would be nice. Including ADFs drawings, even if they aren't comics. He's kind of a big deal.
 
All of our artistic lolcows in a collab sound pretty good to me, it would probably need to be upgraded as new cows come in though.
 
How's this?

backdrop.jpg
 
The transparent black overlay doesn't extend through the entire page length.
 
I do like gray themes, they're really easy on the eyes, especially when I have the lights out and the curtains drawn.

Not really sure what the end goal is you're going for style though.

Before you switched things up, I read the Brianna Wu page, I really dug how it felt like an actual wikipedia page or just a wiki that took itself semi-seriously, given how well cited and researched everything was even though it was visually rather simple or boring.
Felt a bit more legitimate and organized as opposed to the Farms itself or ED which are prone to dumb jokes or a-logging or sensationalist and trivial news or description subject to the style and character of the author.
I understand it's a weird balance of informative content versus entertainment, but I feel like ED or just the OP of a Farms thread already serves the purpose if we're going into casual lolcow infodump territory.
I think this more organized tone is what you're going for?
A weird, maybe irrelevant simulation in my head, has a reporter googling "Brianna Wu" and finding a bunch of heavily researched and cited information revealing her true character and judging the motivations and character of the community that compiled it based upon the organization and visual consistency of the site.

And if this organization is the aim, the tiled comic background seems to contrast thematically with this.
Visually sloppy art tiled across the page, distracting, incoherent, "is this of the site's creators' work? are they inept?", it just seems to clash to me.

The newer logo just seems ugly to me too.
The plain red longhorn was fine on its own, even though I'm not really sure how it was associated with the content (are we vultures picking at the rotting corpses of broken souls?), but the autism logo encorporated into the Wikipedia puzzle piece motif, while clever, doesn't really fit for me either, might just be the colors (against the grey?), I'm not sure.

Honestly, I'm not an artist or a graphic designer, I'm not really sure what you want to do with it, I'm maybe overthinking it, and I probably won't use the site that much, so take my criticism with a grain of salt.
 
@Puppet Pal Clem I've always liked designing websites to look and feel classy while being about retarded shit. Case and point: https://lolcow.email uses a very standard professional usage of Bootstrap while being tongue and cheek about it. The forum also uses professional software and minimalist modern designs despite being about autism.

I understand what you're saying, and as counter, what I am trying to do is give the impression that people actually care about what they're doing on the wiki. I changed the theme to a darker version of Vector for two reasons: 1) dark themes are just better, 2) I want it to not look like MediaWiki.

I can see what you're saying about the backdrop, because there's a reason why I use a classy redraw of Sonichu instead of actual Sonichu. It just looks better.

Though I'm not sure how I can reel it towards what I want, which as I said, is just a classy dark look with a small amount of love that makes it look like the people working on it give a shit.
 
Alright, I think I understand at least a little bit about you wanting it to be a bit more personalized to the Farms.

But this seems to mostly oppose the concept of it being some more formal and organized source of information.
Or at least at a certain point, too much personalization can alienate or confuse outsiders or newcomers, and I think these are mostly the people who would end up using lolcow wiki.

People who are going to use it, are people are not familiar with specific lolcows or lolcow events, and thusly not super involved in the communities or threads about them, who intentionally or unintentionally show up to read about them and be informed.
As I mentioned earlier, the most pretentious and influential interaction I can think of that the wiki might have is with an actual journalist scrolling around for information about gamergate or lolcows related to it or other web communities.
This isn't a person who shows up already knowing about Chris or Deaglenation.

I too very much like darker themes, stylistically and functionally, but I don't necessarily associate them with formal or technical information.
Anytime I'm thinking of a wiki that uses a non-standard color scheme, I'm typically thinking of some sort of fandom or video game wiki.
Where if I'm thinking of something mostly standard, it's some kind of specialized technical wiki for a language or library or wikipedia itself.
Yes, there are exceptions, but I feel like the more it looks like some default MediaWiki, the more technical and legitimate it will appear visually.
A compromise of this might be, a wiki with a white body of text, and simple colored side panels.

In hindsight the comic backdrop is a little more subtle than I remember it but it still feels strange to me depending on what the wiki is trying to do tonally.
An alternative backdrop that's more subtle but maybe still personalized is sort of a dim tiled wall of text, light gray font on dark gray back ground or something, where the casual observer may think the text is lorem ipsum, but it's really quotes from random.txt, or lines of the day, or just ridiculous lolcow jargon, or lolcow quotes, maybe tilted at a angle for flair. Like a darker subtler version of that Steve Jobs poster or something.

Just a thought.
thankyoustevecloseup.jpg
 
I think you should swap the hyperlink color with the clicked hyperlink color, or make the unclicked hyperlink color slightly less bright and eye-catching (or just less orange maybe)
 
I'll try tweaking some of the meta design elements tomorrow to get a more trustworthy appearance going on. This is something I'm very interested in because I don't want people turned off before they read anything.
 
Looks a lot cleaner imo, but it's got softcoreporn on the frontpage as well, not that I don't enjoy Alison Rapp's body of work.

Maybe a spoiler feature or lewdness barrier can cover up pictures of special individuals' unseemly and curved ducks or other intimate images that are a part of their lolcow persona.
 
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