Ugly Webpage

[Rob B.]

I love this place. the administration seems very welcoming and cool. * cough*

but this orange and light purple web page is really ugly and making something more attractive would help this place GROW in popularity.

[Cameron]

Hi, Crash,

I think we're all open to opinions and trying to make things better.

I personally like the design here. Not sure if it's your monitor, or what, but the design is grey, black, white, and a fading gradient. There is no purple here.

We plan on adding more features as time goes on, but I think the design overall is much more appealing compared to some alternatives out there.

[Goran_M]

We all have our own tastes in a lot of different things.  The aim of the website, imho, is to be simple yet to stand out in a subtle way.  And it has achieved that.

I wouldn't go so far as to call it "Ugly".

Purple?  Check your monitors contrast settings or your temperature settings.

Goran

[Rob B.]

let me try this another way...

Know what Nike, Coca-Cola,Delta Airlines, Southwest Airlines, Continental Airlines, Adidas, uhh... Chevrolet, and well X-plane.org all have in common?    Branding!    well your site has this too, to an extent.

It's obvious why branding is important. people come back to a appealing and familiar brand. listen to me: I did not start this thread to slam your web page!  I started it to maybe get some juices flowing as to what we can do to increase this sites popularity. increase user base and show with numbers ol you know who he might not be the only show in town. branding people. I have a degree in graphic arts. let me suggest that, yeah sometime simple works, but what if there was a brand logo that would enhance this site and increase user loyalty, increase traffic and boost this site to a new level. like I said, the biggest companies use this strategy and there is a good reason for it.  this sounds like a good opprotunity to have a design contest. 

just something to think about. I have photoshop and I know how to use it well.

[Nosig]

Well, the site as a whole could certainly need some sort of branding, a frontpage or some sort of logo / picture use (as an example, check out the Dutch pilot forum I use daily and click on each subforum to see the changing photo theme to get inspiration: http://www.airwork.nl/bulletinboard/ ). I would rather call the current design boring (the color setting a bit seventies), more than ugly. But where on earth do you see light purple? If you know photoshop, you should know how to calibrate or fix your monitor color settings.

The current color settings reminded me of this default colored F28:

(btw, preview of my post doesn't seem to work (firefox, snow leopard))

[Moreira]

I personally like the design here. Not sure if it's your monitor, or what, but the design is grey, black, white, and a fading gradient. There is no purple here.

[2] !

;D

[garrettm30]

Nerd alert! Ignore this post if you don't care.

I didn't join but a couple days ago, but just for the fun of taking part in the discussion, I wish to vidicate crash that there is indeed a lavender tone on this webpage, that is, crash's "light purple." [Note: This totally doesn't matter, and the lavender doesn't bother me. I post just for the fun of it. ] Observe my screen shot of this forum below:

I have marked two regions on this page as # 1 and 2. My screen shot will look different according to the monitor of each individual, so I have resorted to the numbers as provided by Photoshop from the digital screen shots (i.e., before the digital information is calibrated and sent to the display). Region #2 is pure gray. It has a brightness value of 89%, but its hue and saturation values are both at 0%. Saturation is the important value, as it represents the amount of color infused in the sample. 0% saturation represents any value from pure white to pure black along a pure gray scale. Hue is irrelevant at 0% saturation, because it essentially means that 0% of the hue is in the sample.

Follow me so far? #2 is pure gray. What I have labeled region #1 is the color in question. Photoshop values it at 232° hue on the color wheel, saturation 7%, and brightness at 86%. Again, saturation is the relevant value. 232° is a very definite blue on the color wheel, and this sample has 7% of that blue. The eye (or brain rather) interprets colors in a somewhat relative way--amazing, our sight is! Viewed by itself, that mere 7% of color would be interpreted as gray by our brains. But viewed next to the genuinely pure gray, we can distinguish a bluish hue.

If I wasn't clear enough for you to follow those values, let's try it from another angle. Our displays are based on the three colors red, green, and blue (hence the RGB). I bet you all already knew that there are one of each of these colors within a single pixel--well, at the monitor's native resolution at least. So computers represent colors by the intensity values of each sub-pixels, that is, the red, green or blue dots. In 24-bit color, each sub-pixel gets 8 of those bits of information, which yields a range of 256 possible intensities from completely dark to completely illuminated for each sub-pixel, labeled from 0 to 255.

Region #2 has digital RGB values of 226 226 226. That means each sub-pixel is lit to the same intensity, and, assuming your monitor can render pure red, green, and blue, it will appear as gray. Region #1 has RGB values of 205 207 220. The blue sub-pixel is illuminated to a higher intensity than the red and green. This variation is what gives us color. In this case, it is that lavender color we are seeing.

In the end, as crash has graphics experience, I would suppose he either has a monitor that can better represent a difference as subtle as 7% in saturation than a consumer model, or else he is better able to recognize the difference--possibly both.

Of course, none of that matters, but I had fun. Crash, I see purple! (And I still happily use the forum.)