Swan Tower facelift

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All right, folks. Courtesy of the inestimable sapphohestia, Swan Tower is getting a facelift to its CSS. I would very much appreciate it if some of you could take a look at the pages she’s mocked up with the new style, and let me know what you think. Is it readable? Does the page layout feel balanced? How does it work in other browsers, or with other sizes of screen? Etc. (Don’t bother pointing out busted links; we’ve only got three pages set up. When the change happens for real, we’ll just be pasting in the new CSS; all the links will work as they normally do.)

The three pages to look at are:
Introduction
Doppelganger
Midnight Never Come

There are two changes I still intend to make, though they haven’t happened yet. One is that I’m trying to get a proper site logo designed, which would replace the current image in the upper left-hand corner. The other is that I intend to have a bit of padding around images (the example here is the Doppelganger cover image) so the text doesn’t run right up against the border like it does now. But other than that, what changes, if any, would you folks suggest?

0 Responses to “Swan Tower facelift”

  1. dsgood

    Works fine in Firefox.

    Note: Doppelganger page: I think there’s a misspelling; I think Jim Carry should be Jim Carey.

  2. hakamadare

    looks good in Safari 2.0.4 (419.3).

    the menus no longer jump around alarmingly when i mouse over the “swan tower” logo in the upper left corner. a++.
    text is generally readable; i wasn’t able to make the text do anything horrific by resizing my browser window.
    the W3C isn’t entirely happy with the page.

    -steve

    • Marie Brennan

      1. Very good to know; I hadn’t realized that was a problem before.
      2. Also good.
      3. Eh. I’ve heard enough complaints about W3C validation that I’m not going to get my knickers in a twist over them complaining, unless it turns out to actually be a problem for people viewing the page. (Mostly it seems to be upset about my usage of 50% — oh well — and the link to IGMS, which I can’t do anything about.)

      Thanks for looking it over. Browser compatibility is hard for me to check.

  3. gollumgollum

    Looks good, for the most part. I think the sidebar looks a bit too big, but that may just be a stylistic preference.

    • Marie Brennan

      It looks bigger than it used to for three reasons:

      1) I widened it slightly so “Midnight Never Come” wouldn’t wrap.
      2) We moved it right so it wouldn’t be hard up against the edge of the window.
      3) We moved the content block further right so the fanlisting banner and the longer navbar lines wouldn’t look cramped against the block.

      The content block could maybe go five or ten pixels back to the left, though, which might help.

  4. snickelish

    I don’t much care for the effect of the colors, I’m afraid. The green that looks lovely in your pseudo-icon looks like, I don’t know, military green when there’s so much of it. Or maybe it’s just the gray around the border. Yeah. I think a different color border would help a lot.

    Otherwise, I like the general “look” of the thing.

    My 2 cents. 🙂

    • Marie Brennan

      Getting the colors right is one of the hardest parts. The grey is in there to provide a neutral buffer between the green and things that might not go well with it (like, say, the purple and red of the Doppelganger cover). We can certainly tinker with the green some more; would you want it darker, or what?

      • snickelish

        I’m not sure. Maybe make it a little yellower – closer to your lj text color.

        Also, on the border – I’m not sure whether it would help or hurt, but perhaps you could make a kind of double border by putting a very thin line of black between the gray and green. The green and black looks good, and the gray and black looks good; it’s just the gray and green next to each other than looks off to me. Then again, tinkering with the shade of green might fix that, too.

  5. sora_blue

    Looks lovely on a mac with firefox.

    I’m not bothered by the “military green.”

  6. claripup

    It looks good – I like the colours but agree with the above person who mentioned a thin line of black between the green and grey. Also the side bar is a little dominant, perhaps a finer/smaller text or un-bold the current one (assuming it is in bold)

    Another thing – which could just be me – is the picture size, the front cover of Doppelgänger is tiny and as such doesn’t catch the eye at all (also not keen on the grey border – black might look sharper) I think it would look more enticing if the pici was about 40-50% bigger

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