Forum:ORAS redesign

Hi guys! Everyone concerned with the success of Pokémon at Wikia — both you guys here at the Pokémon Wiki and we in the Staff offices — have been trying to improve the look and feel of this community for a few weeks now. This is especially important as we move toward the ORAS launch.

If you've been following our deliberations, you'll know that there was great ambiguity in Forum:Vote for new wordmark as to the kind of wordmark we should have, and especially on this notion of whether we had a genuine colour palette' here. A colour palette is awfully important, as it's the design foundation on which any wikia is built. The best looking wikias have a very clear sense of colour. They use the same colours — exactly — in the same situations, and they make sure that all the colours harmonise.

After talking it around with some others on staff, we found it incredibly difficult to perceive a particular colour palette in operation here. For instance, on the front page, there are about eight slightly different shades of blue. Infoboxes have wildly different colours. And tables on pages are themselves differently coloued from both each other and any infoboxes that are on the page.

This lack of colour synergy makes it incredibly difficult for me, as the designer working with you, to offer solutions. So in consultation with my boss, we decided that the best way forward was simply to give you a colour palette, via a full-scale site redesign!

This is well beyond what Energy X's design request was for, but honestly if there is no colour palette, the community will never reach its full design potential.

If you go to w:c:czechitout, you'll see the proposed new redesign. The colour palette is based upon artwork submitted to us directly from Nintendo. The blues are taken directly from Sapphire artwork, but brought down a few shades so that dark text would still be visible. And if you go to a page like w:c:czechitout:Headline test and look at the right rail, you'll see that the contrasting gold matches the gold in the wordmark.

Oh and the wordmark, we're quite proud to say, doesn't come from us, but rather a member of your own community. We're very happy to support the work of Adrián Perry GZ, whose design we've tweaked only for transparency issues.

The background is taken directly from ORAS artwork provided by Nintendo, and represents a much higher-quality effort than was my initial effort. Note that it displays differently depending upon how wide one's browser is stretched. That means it's a responsive design, and something you readers will probably have fun playing with.

As for the content of the front page, you'll notice it's changed somewhat. In the first place, there was kind of an overload of information on the front page, so we've scaled it back a bit. We've also included video from the official Pokémon channel on YouTube. Most of it may seem basic, but it tries to give a well-rounded view of the franchise by giving a motion-picture glance of the main components of the franchise. Now, these videos do mean that we no longer have space for some of your features, but we at the Wikia offices find hat videos tend to make people stay a little longer and play a little more. It's hoped that by having more of a multimedia approach to your front page, we'll gain readers who are staying longer. So, yes, you've lost some front page features, but we think what you've gained is increased interactivity.

We've also introduced an official font, supplied directly by Nintendo, using a red found in the Omega Ruby logo, and one that's equally legibly on the blue background as well as the gold of the right rail (that is, the modules that are like "Recent Wiki Activity" and "Must Watch Videos"). So this is not something we found on the web somewhere. It's not an approximation of Nintendo fonts. It's the real deal, and you'll find it all over that ad for the UK ORAS code giveaway.

Given the number of specialised templates you guys have, I've done just about as much as I can on my test site, so I'm at the point where I need your faith and trust to go ahead and move this design to the live site. Now, this design is obviously going to mean some work in redesigning infoboxes and tables. And there will be a period of a few days where some of your current templates won't look "right" in this new palette. But it won't take long to make suitable changes. And it would be massively more efficient if we could just go ahead and make the move after a few days of discussion. Just to give one example, I can't know, for sure, that the blog feature you guys have on your front page will work with this design until I can actually put the design on your front page. That's just because I have no blog entries on my test wiki, and it would be faster just to use your existing blogs.

It's important to note that I'm not saying you have to take this design or leave it. If you don't quite like the blue background, we can change that. If you're not happy with the language in some areas, we can change that too. All I'm looking for here is approval to put the on the site, where tweaks will be much easier to make, and where I can make links that actually go somewhere.

So what do you guys think? Does it look good enough that you could trust me to put it on the site and make tweaks there? — CzechOut 20:23, October 23, 2014 (UTC)