...still, there is no new release, but these days you may notice I am working on the new layout of miniBB.

It's really only *me* left working on miniBB project now, 'cause Mr. Sergei Larionov officially quit it few months ago.

Now I'm the only one left with my own vision, and truly saying, I don't want miniBB to be in gay or corpse colors anymore.

I'm not a designer, so I will just take my own feelings and perception into attention, and not theological techniques. And what I like at this moment, is more sun, more warmness and joy on this software.

The new layout will come up gradually, and I invite each of you to share your opinions and thoughts on it.

The new version of miniBB, including some significant options and fixes, will be released with the new layout; I hope in the end of August or beginning-middle of September 2011.

I really appreciate your hard working on it, and I hope MiniBB will be more power full than ever.. :)

Cheers!

It's nice to see your real appreciation, thank you :)

However, what do you think of the current initial schema?

Do you like spring colors? Green/yellow colors?
What do you think?

Well, Of course Spring colors are very nice!

And I think this color is also nice.

But yellow isn't good for eyes when some one try to send posts and read posts.

Thanks :)

I like the colors, live and tropical ;). The only color that may not match is on the index page the light-blue color (blue and green don't work well it seems). Other than that it's fresh enough ;).

It seems so, but... could you point me where exactly do you see the blue color on the first page?

Hm, now it's more green which works well - I mean this class: forumTitle (yesterday I viewed the site on a different monitor and it looked more blue). Now I like it. Topic pages are easy for eyes too.

Nice, fresh look! Although in my opinion the right hand sidebar on forum's main page is a bit too bright.

Wow! What an unexpected, refreshing change; I like the 'breezy, Spring' feeling the draft new palette conveys - nice work, Paul.
Heheh, can we expect to see a change every season? e.g., an earth-toned palette for Autumn. :-)

As you continue to fine-tune the new colour scheme, Paul, my suggestion is to use as few colours as possible (3 or 4), for too many colours will just be too distracting.

All the best -
mb

Thank you for your opinion, guys. The scheme is developing instantly that's why I tend to make some changes :)
But even now I see and feel, fresh colors in mini software look much better than cold colors.

Well, do you really think so, or do you think so because you were told to think so?

Last times I was paid attention how information affects our progress. And nowadays, there is a lot information around, and it's very difficult to make a proper choice of the correct information.

When I thought about the totally new theme of miniBB, I just throw all of my knowledge, which I've got from various sources, and I try to look at the absolutely undoubted source of information for any human - our Planet.

And when you look at this world of nature, you will see a lot of colors, not just few. Combination of various colors is natural for any people, and the nature doesn't have disharmonious colors at all.

Let's take a look at some examples:



Here we have lots of green, red, dark green, dark blue, and light blue. Does it look disharmonious? I don't think so.



Here we have lots of green, lots of yellow, orange and all halftones of blue.



Here we have yellow, green, blue and black. But again, it's pleasure to the eyes to see something like this.

I think, disabling people with limited colors is not truly the proper way of developing attractive graphics for web. People are born with colors, and even people are all born in different colors.

Colors are really just 3 - red, green and blue, and other "colors" are just toning combination of them. I suppose, these toning combinations could vary, and in miniBB, too :)

I'll continue to work on it. Thanks to all opinions.

Nope. This time, I hope to make a version which really will work for years. :)

I think layout/graphics is better than from a professional designer. I've always knows green text on light background (like yellowish or white) is very easy for the eyes, but it's hard to achieve good results working with green. But so far it's a success here ;).

Glad to see developments going here. Here's my observation...

The icons are too colorful I believe. I think it would be best if they are of single colors.



The forum supertitle and forum titles are using too much contrasting colors. They can be very distracting.



Rest everything appears to be fine!

Cheers :)

I can explain it all :)

My idea is exactly that icons should be in different colors. Why?

1. It's possible to analyze what forums are most popular, that will mean their topics are listed most often in Recent Topics (the new miniBB version will contain this graph in Statistics). Then it's possible to specify similar-scheme-color icons for these forums, so they build kind of special color tone on the first page. You can "paint it yourself" that way.

2. It's a good presentation to show there are different color icons available, and so even choosing icons from default package for their forums, they can specify one icon for all forums, like you suggest.

This is actually up to each forum owner.

Currently I think it should be an explosive rainbow. "Free-your-mind" style. I know it looks unusual from the usual design point of view. But different color icons bring something always fresh and updated each day. Like the colors changes in nature.

Yes, forum supertitles intentionally are contrasted. But I think about it in the future.That's not the final version.

Thank you for the points!

Hi Paul! It's really something pretty cool, except this turquoise (or how to call it?) color that used for forums' names. In my view it really doesn't match anything.