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Offer to help with website development

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Captain_Valiant
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Offer to help with website development

Hi,

This is a general offer to help out with development/support of the site for CoT. My real life alter-ego has around 15 years experience in web and general software development (JS/node, C#, Golang and AWS dev-ops, for the record) and in pure front-end dev and design. I'm a former long-time City of Heroes player who'd like to help out, and as game development is a little out of my area of expertise I thought I'd offer to chip in where I could be of some use.

Just as an example, I spent a couple of afternoons playing around with restyling of your site's main page. Below is a couple of screengrabs of a pretty minimal example, but its fully responsive, cross-browser (think I tested down to IE9), requires no JS (so should speed up the page) and has a much smaller CSS footprint.

Desktop:
[img]https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mdrob001/images/master/test.png[/img]

Mobile:
[img]https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mdrob001/images/master/test_mobile.png[/img]

I realise you may already have plans to migrate your site and forums once you start nearing release, but the offer is there nonetheless.

Best of luck for 2019.

Empyrean
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I know nothing about web

I know nothing about web design, but I know I like how that looks :).

FIGHT EVIL! (or go cause trouble so the Heroes have something to do.)

Lin Chiao Feng
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I proposed a look similar to

I proposed a look similar to that last year, but it didn't pan out. That said, you seem to have found a potentially better font, at least. In any case, a different direction was chosen for the site's look, and we've been building toward that. Starting with a non-monotone logo. I like the reduced-JS optimizations; we would have done some of those had the framework not broken it.

Half of the stuff I can't do is because the web site framework is a disaster. So we're switching to a better one.

That said, we'd love to interview you, and would like to remind everyone that you should use the [url=/contact]contact form[/url] to get in touch with us, as this lets us share emails without putting anyone's private email addresses right on the site for spammer harvesting.

[i]Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...[/i]

Interdictor
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The examples above remind me

The examples above remind me a lot of Champions Online's UI, and in my opinion that is not a good thing. Please for the love of god don't use anything remotely like Comic Sans, Astounder or similar "comic-booky" fonts for a primary typeface. It kind of looks cheap and kitschy. The New Website example given in the "What We Do: Project Update" from a few months back looks clean and modern, and is the style you should be going for, in my opinion.

Javacado
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Interdictor wrote:
Interdictor wrote:

The examples above remind me a lot of Champions Online's UI, and in my opinion that is not a good thing. Please for the love of god don't use anything remotely like Comic Sans, Astounder or similar "comic-booky" fonts for a primary typeface. It kind of looks cheap and kitschy. The New Website example given in the "What We Do: Project Update" from a few months back looks clean and modern, and is the style you should be going for, in my opinion.

I'm in agreement with Interdictor here. Please avoid the generic Comic Sans-styled font for the new website. It's very bland and honestly is a font style I'm pretty sure even modern comics have abandoned for quite some time now. While its nice to have something that's at least flashy, it should also be more up-to-date by current day standards. I guess the word I'm looking for would be: dynamic.

"If I am to die in battle, Remember me for who I was and not what I've become..."

McJigg
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Comic Sans is for work place

Comic Sans is for work place memos, greeting cards and e-mails from HR. We can do better.

Lin Chiao Feng
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McJigg wrote:
McJigg wrote:

Comic Sans is for work place memos, greeting cards and e-mails from HR. We can do better.

And [url=https://home.cern/news/news/cern/cern-switch-comic-sans]CERN presentations[/url] of [url=https://www.theverge.com/2012/7/4/3136652/cern-scientists-comic-sans-higgs-boson]historic discoveries[/url].

Seriously, though, font-wise we're going to be using Oswald a lot more, likely with Open Sans for block text. You can see Oswald in the menu bar and several other places; I migrated some of this site's UI to the new fonts back last year. (Font changes, like color changes, are easy.)

The header and footer bars will be largely unchanged; the biggest change will be the header bar background switching from blue to black. This is done to better integrate with the main elements we're building the front page around (i.e. to keep from clashing with their colors).

[i]Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...[/i]

Interdictor
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Lin Chiao Feng wrote:
Lin Chiao Feng wrote:
McJigg wrote:

Comic Sans is for work place memos, greeting cards and e-mails from HR. We can do better.

And [url=https://home.cern/news/news/cern/cern-switch-comic-sans]CERN presentations[/url] of [url=https://www.theverge.com/2012/7/4/3136652/cern-scientists-comic-sans-higgs-boson]historic discoveries[/url].

Seriously, though, font-wise we're going to be using Oswald a lot more, likely with Open Sans for block text. You can see Oswald in the menu bar and several other places; I migrated some of this site's UI to the new fonts back last year. (Font changes, like color changes, are easy.)

The header and footer bars will be largely unchanged; the biggest change will be the header bar background switching from blue to black. This is done to better integrate with the main elements we're building the front page around (i.e. to keep from clashing with their colors).

Oswald and Open Sans are a good combo - Oswald is great for headings and Open Sans is clear and easy to read in bulk, plus they are similar in style - at least enough to not appear mismatched.

Atama
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I like Oswald... Interesting

I like Oswald... Interesting, readable, but not amateurish.

Shadow Elusive
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Our official brand fronts are

Our official brand fronts are Oceanic Drift (the logo) and Oswald. Yeah we're not touching comic sans we promise.

[center]--------------------------[/center]
[center][color=#ff0000]Interior Map Lead and UI Designer[/color][/center]

Halae
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Shadow Elusive wrote:
Shadow Elusive wrote:

Yeah we're not touching comic sans we promise.

I can't put into words how much more comfortable this makes me.

An infinite number of tries doesn't mean that any one of those tries will succeed. I could flip an infinite number of pennies an infinite number of times and, barring genuine randomness, they will never come up "Waffles".

Grimfox
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That's a good plan for April

That's a good plan for April first. Comic Sans everywhere.

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Interdictor
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Grimfox wrote:
Grimfox wrote:

That's a good plan for April first. Comic Sans everywhere.

Throw in some Hobo and Papyrus and they're good to go!

Empyrean
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Whoa! People take their

Whoa! People take their fonts seriously around these parts :P! I should have been more specific, I wasn't intending to comment on the font, just the overall layout.

I don't personally have strong negative feelings against Comic Sans--I did grow up reading comics after all. It would be annoying if it were over-used, though.

FIGHT EVIL! (or go cause trouble so the Heroes have something to do.)

Atama
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As long as you don’t screw up

As long as you don’t screw up the kerning I could be forgiving on font usage.

But you best kern well.

Lin Chiao Feng
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Interdictor wrote:
Interdictor wrote:
Grimfox wrote:

That's a good plan for April first. Comic Sans everywhere.

Throw in some Hobo and Papyrus and they're good to go!

[img]https://apeanutbutterfiend.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/papyrus-sans_opt.jpg[/img]

Atama wrote:

As long as you don’t screw up the kerning I could be forgiving on font usage.

But you best kern well.

Don't worry, we know our keming.

[i]Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...[/i]

Captain_Valiant
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FYI, everybody, the font is

FYI, everybody, the font is 'Bangers' from the free Google Font API. https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Bangers

I was looking to evoke the gold on black textboxes commonly seen in the Silver Age of comics. You can't see from the screenshots, but the body text is 'Cabin' : https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Cabin, also from the Google Fonts API, but I toyed around with Open Sans as well. My reasoning was that people might come to a comic book/superhero game website with certain expectations regarding the design. I'd fight the corner that giving the overall design a hint of comic book design touches would be no bad thing.

I'll be in touch via the standard contact form, guys.

Brand X
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I like it.

I like it.

chase
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Lin Chiao Feng wrote:
Lin Chiao Feng wrote:

I proposed a look similar to that last year, but it didn't pan out. That said, you seem to have found a potentially better font, at least. In any case, a different direction was chosen for the site's look, and we've been building toward that. Starting with a non-monotone logo. I like the reduced-JS optimizations; we would have done some of those had the framework not broken it.

Half of the stuff I can't do is because the web site framework is a disaster. So we're switching to a better one.

That said, we'd love to interview you, and would like to remind everyone that you should use the [url=/contact]contact form[/url] to get in touch with us, as this lets us share emails without putting anyone's private email addresses right on the site for spammer harvesting.

Regarding the new framework. I assume you're just getting a new framework for Drupal? not a wholly new CMS?

JWBullfrog
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Shadow Elusive wrote:
Shadow Elusive wrote:

Our official brand fronts are Oceanic Drift (the logo) and Oswald. Yeah we're not touching comic sans we promise.

What he doesn't know is that Comic Sans is my default font. So, y'know....

Wait until you see the... nope, that would ruin the surprise.