Could you give an examples of good design (links).

"Good" in design could be very subjective...

of course, when saying this is good or this is bad it depends much on once personal taste. And there are many different point(s) of view(s).

This is for i thought to be a good idea to start looking for other designer and graphicians. To get fresh air and new ideas.

But there are sure some aspects which can be measured I think. The quality of the graphics for example, the all and all view, does everything fit together, what is the first look, is the look unique, does it look sorted, does a visitor imagine the navigation, do the coulors match together, ...

just my view of course
michael

I have been requesting permission to port many of the templates over at clantemplates.com. pfft, very responsive group let me tell ya..

If you want quality artists that are decent people go to

http://www.gamerenders.com

good luck, artist are finnicky

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roflol!

I am an 'artist' though some artists would say i am not because i paint with decorative art in mind and tend to paint things rather than canvases...haven't quite mastered the art of turning tha paintings i have done into graphics. The logo on my site is an example of my very newbie effort...

However I offer can offer graphics whizzes images of those paintings on my site to play with with one proviso...they kneed to acknowledge the image they start with from my site...all they need to do first is ask as some designs while painted by me are not original in design - they follow someone elses pattern. That is how I learned to paint. My logo came from a photo of a towel rail I painted.

If you want 'ideas' search for sites on 'folk art', 'decorative painting' 'craft' sites on google. You get a whole lot of colour, logos and buttons - they don't all use XOOPS - but they have managed to 'decorate' their pages with some interesting images in backgrounds and buttons. Some of these have beed designed for them by graphics whizzes from their own paintings.

Some examples:
Barb watson

Debbie Mitchel

Deanne

John Lillidale

Kingslan and kilbisco

Larissa

John Lovett


Hinderloopen


artists network


theres some eye candy - for artists anyway!

I can't speak for Michael, Bassman, or anyone else, but to clarify a little on what I'm looking for...

It seems that the most common candidates for using XOOPS are the younger crowd. This crowd is more into tuner cars, gaming, and technology based designs, and they could care less about a clean, highly technical example of semantic markup and pure CSS positioning. They just want their theme to look cool!

I've recently shifted directions in my theme design efforts and made a not so suprising discovery. Most user's want cool graphics and effects.

To illustrate this point, look at the most popular XOOPS theme downloads on my site.

Most of the themes in the top 10 list have been out for several months, except for one, the CS-Lite theme. That theme is very new to my collection, yet it is in the top 5 most popular themes. Why? Simple, it's targetted towards gamers. The kicker is, it's not even that fancy, but XOOPSers are starving for gaming/tuner/high tech themes.

That's one of the biggest obsticals facing XOOPS with regards to gaining in popularity. We have a lot of nice "Clean" designs that would be well suited for business applications, but we have very little to offer the largest users of portal systems.

Speaking from experience, the hardest part about designing an awesome gaming/tuner/high tech theme is finding graphics that you can use. There are a couple sites I go to that allow you to use the graphics for your designs, but there is very little in the way of gaming, tuner cars, and other modern trends.

To put it bluntly, we've got a crap load of coders, but very few modern graphic artists.

Joomla!, xaraya, Postnuke, etc, all have contributing graphic artists, which is a big reason why they are so wildly popular. XOOPS does not, which is why we are not nearly as popular as we could be.

I hate to say this because it means I'm going to have to eat some crow, but the average user doesn't care about the coding, they only care about how their site looks. We NEED more "eye candy" designs.

As soon as I have more time available, I'm going to be porting over some designs from http://andreasviklund.com/ but this is only a beginning. We need artists to work with who can (and will) create design elements that cater to the current trends.

Like others in this thread, I can code XHTML and CSS until the cows come home, but I'm not that great at graphics design. One look at my site is evidence of that.

So, who is willing to work with us coders to produce themes that target the hotest new trends? Heck, I don't even need a designer that knows anything about XHTML or CSS! If they know what 800x600px means and can export their design to either a PSD or PNG file, I can slice it and make it a XOOPS theme!

Best Regards,

James

Hear Hear James.

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I'm young, I'm all for semantic xhtml and css layouts!

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that's what i meant by saying all the above. What is needed is fresh ideas in different directions. Not only what i like, though but visual appealing, nice layouts for the eyes.
The more i code the more i personally like pure textual output which is as accessible as possible but as james said, the most do not care about coding they want a nice looking site and they are (partly)correct, most of their visitors don't care either for the source.

starting this thread I want to combine those things, a clean coding with nice visual graphics.

lets not talk until next christmas here in this thread, as we have now some themecoder who are able to look for clean code, lets start :

external:
1) to set up an annoucement text which we can spread on our sites (and other forums places we know) and perhaps some user will helps us by a,sking graphicians they know.

internal:
2) set up some rules we want to follow. x[html] css valid, as example.

opinions?
michael

Thank you, I have been saying exactly this since... lets see when did I register...

I am a gamer, some call us losers, I prefer gamer.

I build sites relative to that which I like to do.

I know that this isnt really just about the X4G (XOOPS for Gamers) community.

However, those of us that use XOOPS on every clan and resource site that we do, all the while fighting that #OOPS#ed nuke. Are dying for some really Kickin Themes ;p

I am truly glad to see interst in this topic and will put the word out on some of the artist communities that I frequesnt

Be Sure to check out

http://www.gamerenders.com
http://www.deviantart.com/
http://www.pixel2life.com/
http://www.photoshopgurus.com/
http://www.clantemplates.com

Some of the best GA's I have ever seen frequent these communities.

thanks Biteronboard,

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we will need help

And i'm sure we can make clansites with nice output too.

Any help to get contact to some artists is really great. One of my biggest frontier is the lack of making me understandable in a language which is not my native.

michael