I agree, the new colours look a lot better.

Oh, and one other problem relating to that calendar mouseover effect in Opera, I believe a screenshot will illustrate it nicely - it's not a real issue, but you can get some weird rendering out of it...

Without the mouse over it:


and with:


It seems to be changing the widths just enough to push things around. Not really a problem, but it does look a little odd.

I'm going to add to the logo comments. It may be unique, but it doesn't look good. Maybe it would be better if the pixelation were smoother, but that would only help a little. The logo text doesn't stand out very well, either.

My eye, however, is not drawn to the logo, so maybe it doesn't matter. My eye is drawn to the giant hunk of empty space to the right of it. I hate to say it, but the site might look better with a fixed maximum width.

I'd add some extra padding around your body text, as well. At the top, and certainly to the left and right, which jam up against the sides.

So long as you have rollover images, how about rollover text links? The standard blue-to-maroon link doesn't exactly scream 'click me!'

The &#106avascripting on the buttons annoys me greatly. I would like the link opened in a new tab. Others might prefer a new window, but you don't allow that. Why don't you want google involved?

The gradient on the calendar is unusually strong. Also, the +/- seem to be backwards. Perhaps you intended this, but it seems counterintuitive.

My other problems with the site are more large-scale lack of design design issues.

My impression is that you know how to write websites, but you are quite unfamiliar with basic concepts of Graphic Design.

I made a random googling for 'basic graphic design' and found Basic Graphic Design. It is quite short, but if you read it you will find several things you didn't think about in your design.

Some of them are:

• You want to fill the whole page with information; don't forget to keep some space unused!


• Where's the uncolored parts of the site?


• The lines in a graphic design should not need to be accentuated, but rather inderectly formed by content. On your site you have lots of relativly thick lines that separetes things, for instance between news items.


• The text line width is waay to far, at least on 1024x768. It worsens the readability. This can be solved by increasing font size (I think too many websites have to small fonts), and creating a column for the calendar on the right. Keep some space unused, remember?


• One very obvious 'line breaker' is the first news item. Each news item should have a rectangular space, but the top news item is ruined by the calendar and the link menu. I don't think the links should be that accentuated btw.

So the most obvious mistake you have made is the basic graphic design idea of lines. Lines is the thing that users of your site unconsciously follows, but the lines on your site is a bit messed up, and also they are graphicly implemented which they should't need to, at least not that much.

I hope I was more constructive than mean, but to tell you the truth, the site needs some redesign, not technicly, but graphic designly.

Quote:Original post by Enselic
So the most obvious mistake you have made is the basic graphic design idea of lines.

Graphic Design is not science, it is art. You cannot make a "mistake" in it, you can only make a descision and from there it's quality is almost entirely subjective. Of course if it impedes upon usability then it is a flaw from a accessibility perspective.

I did take your advice and reducing line thickness. The liquidity of the layout will remain however. The user can always adjust the width of their browser window. They can also adjust the display size of the text in their browser settings. In IE and Opera this will not break the site, and in Firefox there is plenty of room for usable adjustment.

Also, the link you posted was on the design of ads. My site has no advertising, it is not a commercial site, it is for a non-profit club at my school.

The banner looks a bit better now that it's 'background' stretches all the way across rather than cutting off, although personally I think it looks like it was made with the spray-can in MSPaint and doesn't look particularly professional.

The changes to the main page look a bit better too, it looks more like a coherent page now rather than a series of blocks jambed together.

The re-drawing with mouseover issue I mentioned with the calendar appears to be fixed

Overall, it looks much better than how it started off, keep up the good work.

Quote:Original post by T1Oracle

Quote:Original post by Enselic
So the most obvious mistake you have made is the basic graphic design idea of lines.

Graphic Design is not science, it is art. You cannot make a "mistake" in it, you can only make a descision and from there it's quality is almost entirely subjective. Of course if it impedes upon usability then it is a flaw from a accessibility perspective.

I did take your advice and reducing line thickness. The liquidity of the layout will remain however. The user can always adjust the width of their browser window. They can also adjust the display size of the text in their browser settings. In IE and Opera this will not break the site, and in Firefox there is plenty of room for usable adjustment.

Also, the link you posted was on the design of ads. My site has no advertising, it is not a commercial site, it is for a non-profit club at my school.

Art and Graphic Design are two diffrent things.
Making good Graphic Design is art.

Graphic Design is the practice of designing ads, newspapers, websites and all sorts of work that contains graphics and/or text. To do this there are some simple guidelines that is recomended to follow.

These guidlines can ofcourse be stretched if it makes for the better, but I don't think ignoring these guidelines made your site look better.

The news items look better now. I would, however, add a little padding above and under the header text, and then some more padding between the news items.

I also think your point of letting the users adjust the webpage and increasing the font size manually is on the complete wrong track. The responsibility of a good looking and easy to use site lies on the graphic design guy, not on the users.

Since you in your OP explicitly said you would like feedback, I find it strange and a bit sad that you reject it most of it [sad].

And also, the article I linked to is general, not only for ads...

Now don't get me wrong! Your site has potential, but there is still room for improvment on the graphic design side. I don't want to sound negavite, but I really likes to put my finger on what I think could be done better, so I guess my posts sometimes sound 100% negative, which is not the case here, it is just that I bring forward the negative sides.

References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphic_design - Graphic Design is maybe not science, but I would not call it art...
http://slashdot.org/ - An example of clear lines in the design, and a good balance of informationn space and unused space.

Quote:Original post by Kazgoroth
The banner looks a bit better now that it's 'background' stretches all the way across rather than cutting off, although personally I think it looks like it was made with the spray-can in MSPaint

I used Photoshop CS2, the intent with it was to get a digital look showing a transition of sampling rates. If you have a better idea on how to achieve that effect I'd love to hear it. I searched good-tutorials.com for some help and found none for the effect I was going for. Anyway, the text also mirrors this theme with a gradient that has a low sampling rate.

Quote:Original post by Enselic
Since you in your OP explicitly said you would like feedback, I find it strange and a bit sad that you reject it most of it [sad].

Actually I've followed most of it, even the things I rejected initially. I am pressed for time on this task however, and the CMS is the more important part that needs to be rock solid and complete. I'm trying to do both and finish it so that my school can have this site before I leave for a year. (I hope the site is still there when I return.) I posted a thread on here about this depature (check my profile).

Quote:Original post by Oluseyi
Don't be so quick to dismiss things you don't know anything about.

Wow, do you not see the hypocrisy in that statement?

Regardless, the quality of a given graphic design is still measured largely by opinion. You cannot assign meaningful numbers to the quality of a given graphic design. Furthermore, every form of art has its objective aspects and underlying structures.


Back on the the subject at hand.

The AITP History page has an example of my layout without the calendar. The calendar only appears on the home page, and the events page (and I may remove it from there). All of these pages are generated from the same XSL and CSS stylesheets. To make separate ones for each page would be counterproductive.

T1Oracle,
I like what you have done with the site. It looks very professional.

Dan