[WIP] Eurobricks Star Wars Theme

[aFrInaTi0n]

Hello beloved Star Wars community,

as I still owe you your old theme, I wanted to start this topic to tell you I just have enabled the (still work in progress) theme already.

Things I started with:

• Implementing the colors from the former available theme
• Replaced the header grpahics with a theme-fitting higher resolution header graphics.

Things which still need attention from my side:

1. Dark Mode - need to find good overwrites for a similar view, this is not always easy.
   Please consider the dark mode as not showing nice colors for now till stated otherwise.
2. Fixing future color issues from reports of users.

Please feel free to give me feedback in this thread. @MKJoshA and the Star Wars Mods may have the last words, I am just the technical guy working on things. 

Currently the theme needs to manually picked in the bottom of the page for testing.

After the theme may be approved as finalized, I can again enable it as the default theme for the Star Wars forum.

[Murdoch17]

Looks very nice @aFrInaTi0n, but I was a bit confused about why I wasn't seeing it at first. Then I had my "Eureka!" moment and realized I had to manually change the page theme via the dropdown menu at the very bottom of the page.

As for suggestions, You have the Sequel series X-wing, so maybe making the Death Star into the EB logo instead of the blue brick and adding a prequel-era ship (something like the EP 1 Republic Cruiser, perhaps?) somewhere would have all three trilogy eras covered. Perhaps throw in that Old Republic Sith ship for good measure to balance out the light and dark sides too.

Edited Saturday at 09:30 PM by Murdoch17

[aFrInaTi0n]

For me personally it is more about the theme working well, less the header graphics being the best pick  - I would leave that topic to @MKJoshA

 

• Issue I realized myself: the user icons are shown vertically - need to fix that.

Also added a clear line how to select the theme - was not clear at all. Thanks for the hint!

[Murdoch17]

5 minutes ago, aFrInaTi0n said:

For me personally it is more about the theme working well, less the header graphics being the best pick  - I would leave that topic to @MKJoshA

Ah. I misunderstood what your were asking about. It makes much more sense now!

[Mandalorianknight]

Hello! Thank you for working on these UI changes, it's nice to see the forum updating.

It might be a case of me taking a minute to adapt, but I do prefer the blue theme for eurobricks, as I always saw it as sort of the forum's signature color. The grey feels a bit bland in comparison and being a similar color to some of the text might be a minor issue. If you want star wars to have a unique color, I would suggest a yellow/gold like the franchise logo, but I doubt that looks as good as I'm imagining it would. Maybe a red would be nice?

The header graphics are a totally fine placeholder but I agree with @Murdoch17 that one representing the major eras would be a better final option. I'd personally go with a more zoomed-out look with a falcon leading a "race" closest to the logo, trailed by a selection of other ships including both major X-wing variants, some TIEs, jedi starfighters, prequel era stuff, the Razor Crest, and maybe an old republic or video game ship.

Again, thank you for doing this- it's nice to see the forum theme update.

[Kaijumeister]

It’s nice to see the Star Wars theme being updated once more, appreciate you doing this @aFrInaTi0n.

I concur that a banner representing all three ‘eras’ of Star Wars would be awesome, especially as some eras involve more colourful ships and characters than others. But a diverse, bright, and colourful assortment of Star Wars ships flying around the banner would be nice (as an idea, could even have some ships in yellow / gold replacing the Eurobricks logo stars) . I guess you wouldn’t want to have too many minifigures cluttering up the banner but having a quintessential character like Luke watching the ships as a parallel to the binary sunset scene could work too.

Otherwise @Mandalorianknight’s idea of having the Falcon ‘leading’ ships from other factions and eras would look awesome.

Edited Sunday at 12:36 PM by Kaijumeister

[aFrInaTi0n]

Technically (sorry, but my main concern :P) the header graphics / motive would be good to also work in mobile views, but this brings some limitations into the whole topic, as on mobile devices people may want to see more content that big headers. In consequence one may need to think of the headers being very narrow, but here it gets hard to fill it in good ways again..

So not all thoughts of some motives may automatically work in headers over the different usecases. Right now it is a hack of three different images stacked on each other:

1. Eurobricks Logo
2. Star-Wars graphics
3. Background graphic

This is the best solution to allow the header to scale in nice ways with every user device resolution. But again it may depend on the intention of the motive which shall be depicted, which would possible need some CSS adjustments as well. The responsive behavior of the header can be tested on Desktops with resizing a browser window or increasing the zoom levels by far.

But as a consequence of this split-up headers things need to be considered:

• Background graphics (the real background, not transparent) needs ideally to work with the Dark mode to show the User Navigation Bar / Icons.
• The foreground graphics needs to fit with the background and ideally the whole motive allows for some parallax effect happening, as the arrangements may slightly differ by devise aspect ratios (4:3, 16:9, 9:16, 16:10 and so forth..)
• Lighting for the foreground motive needs to fit the lightsource of the background to not create any uncanny valley effect.
• All needs to fit in a narrow canvas space of 200px height (original graphics may be larger in resolution)

With all those details I would just like to explain it is not always easy to create a header graphics with those technical limitations (for the sake of responsiveness) in mind - even if the idea may be a great one in itself.

 

[aFrInaTi0n]

A quick example is the current image, which is on purpose cropped on the bottom, as the image is configured to always anchor at the bottom of the header and just enlarge/shrink on the top end - same applies for the horizontal dimension: priority is right, scaling only to the left.

[MKJoshA]

@aFrInaTi0n to clarify, can we have individual banners by forum now? If so, we have some really talented users who could whip one up.

[aFrInaTi0n]

We would need to copy a whole theme - so theoretically yes, but ideally the theme may be in a state good enough already before it is copied, as any later edit would need to be replicated manually to all copied other themes.