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Barthe Hogenboom

Beta Team
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Today 11:07 PM
Hi, I see the website is undergoing some changes. The 3rd column now has Teamspeak. But the new forum topics have disappeared. It's now very hard to see if there's anything new on the forum.

Another problem is the columns themselves; when the screen gets smaller by choosing the Firefox sidebar the Simparts ads etc. go underneath which looks very ugly. In the past this never happened, I think the Teamspeak column is just a bit too wide.

I know how hard this can be, I made some websites myself. All these different browsers and screen resolutions.

Is this a temporary situation while work is being done?
 
Hmmm, You are the first to report issues with new Forum Posts. Do they not show up at all?

Could you post a screenshot for me?

As to the Website yes this will be a temporary issue until the new site is up and running.
 
Christopher Bennett said:
Hmmm, You are the first to report issues with new Forum Posts. Do they not show up at all?
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Not on the website itself like they did before. I have to choose forum in the lounge menu to get the phpBB. I used to react to forum posts directly on the site but that doesn't work anymore. The whole underside where the forum used to be is empty. I also see no events anymore.
Could you post a screenshot for me?
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With sidebar in Firefox:
[imgpop]http://frida-art.nl/barthe/flightsim/images/ACH_site_sidebar.png[/imgpop]
Without sidebar, notice no events 3rd column above and no new forum topics 2nd column below.
[imgpop]http://frida-art.nl/barthe/flightsim/images/ACH_site.png[/imgpop]
It's really noticeable on my square monitor. I think the Teamspeak takes up a little more space. It seems to have a lot of whitespace on the right.
 
Christopher Bennett said:
should be fixed now
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Yes, much better now. I think moving TS to the menu is a good move. It probably also makes the site quicker because it's not instantly loaded.

The adds now move under the news column but that's probably because all news(which was indeed old news) has gone. When there's news+events again it will probably sort like it did before. Maybe test with some....fake news ;) , I mean place holder?

Maybe we should have some default pictures as place holders when there's no event and/or news at the moment? When you post me the dimensions I could brew something with Gimp.
 
Ahhh a graphics artist. Consider yourself conscripted! I will get back to you on dimension's. If you could also come up with a new logo for us that would be cool. We need something fresh. I will be posting an announcement about that later tonight.

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If you could also come up with a new logo for us that would be cool.
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That could be fun. I'd like to help with that. The only thing I have to mention is that I'm not experienced on legal matters. So you would have to check if my design doesn't offend any other companies etc. I know that there are some open-source fonts around we could use but the graphics part is always a bit tricky especially if it has to look like a real airline but not like an existing one.

My first thoughts are something with a toy box theme as we do our flying for children. Maybe some Teddy Bears or rabbits.

I would really like to know what goes out and what stays. At the moment we have a repaint "kit" with fonts and colours. Do we start from scratch or just alter some things?
 
I would really like to leave that up to the creativity of those creating the new logo. Of course we will do final checking of copyrights but other than that I would really like to keep an open mind. Perhaps others will also join in and we can have a selection of logos that we can put up for a vote by the general membership.

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Concerning logo design, here are a couple of recommendations from the perspective of a livery and website tinkerer :wink:
  • Use a vector graphics program (e. g. Inkscape or Adobe Illustrator) - that allows scaling the logo material to all resolutions it could ever be needed in (who guessed back in 2008 that we're now using 4k textures on some aircraft models?)
  • Stay with an open file format (e. g. SVG) or at least make sure you can export to one of these; that doesn't lock us in to a specific graphics software
  • Use only third-party material (fonts, bitmaps, vector graphics) that are public domain or under a permissive Creative Commons license and allow redistribution
  • Define a colour sample board with precise RGB codes for each colour used in the logo. For gradients, record the precise parameter settings used.
  • Publish your draft rendered as PNG (JPEGs can blur in an ugly way), but be ready to provide a full pack with vector graphics, colour samples and the fonts used
Sticking to those five points will actually ensure we can easily re-use the logo for re-branding the website, building liveries and also update the manuals to a new CI.
 
Jesco Freund said:
Concerning logo design, here are a couple of recommendations from the perspective of a livery and website tinkerer :wink:
  • Use a vector graphics program (e. g. Inkscape or Adobe Illustrator) - that allows scaling the logo material to all resolutions it could ever be needed in (who guessed back in 2008 that we're now using 4k textures on some aircraft models?)
  • Stay with an open file format (e. g. SVG) or at least make sure you can export to one of these; that doesn't lock us in to a specific graphics software
  • Use only third-party material (fonts, bitmaps, vector graphics) that are public domain or under a permissive Creative Commons license and allow redistribution
  • Define a colour sample board with precise RGB codes for each colour used in the logo. For gradients, record the precise parameter settings used.
  • Publish your draft rendered as PNG (JPEGs can blur in an ugly way), but be ready to provide a full pack with vector graphics, colour samples and the fonts used
Sticking to those five points will actually ensure we can easily re-use the logo for re-branding the website, building liveries and also update the manuals to a new CI.
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I think those are really valuable remarks, Jesco. Especially point 1. The problem is that I have almost 0 experience with vector so maybe we should select someone who has(you?). I would really like to help with some small jobs. I could also make some graphics after someone created the new ACH house style(colours, fonts etc.). I could make some place holder images for when there's no news/events. Some other graphics that are more one-offs maybe. Because I often work with a combination of hand drawn, Blender renders etc. all mashed together in Gimp.

I've been thinking about the toy box idea I have etc. and that would not work in a logo(too big) but it would work for a nice illustration on some page. Like the graphics with those pilot hats the current site has.

About those fonts; for some websites I made I did some research and there's plenty of open-source material, especially handwriting fonts and weird stuff.
 
Barthe Hogenboom said:
I think those are really valuable remarks, Jesco. Especially point 1. The problem is that I have almost 0 experience with vector so maybe we should select someone who has(you?).
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I'm not too experienced with graphics at all (neither pixel nor vector), and even worse, I'm a goner when it comes to creativity. But if there's some nice drawing or sketch either in Gimp or even by pencil & paper, I can help vectorizing it (in fact I did so with the old set of logo graphics). The cleaner the shapes, the better the results.

Btw. Pixabay holds a nice bunch of vector graphics to start off with, many of them public domain, so they can be reused for building a logo.
Barthe Hogenboom said:
About those fonts; for some websites I made I did some research and there's plenty of open-source material, especially handwriting fonts and weird stuff.
Click to expand...

Indeed, there's no lack on fonts out there. That was more a note to people like me, having Adobe and Apple fonts installed on their computers, got used to using them a lot, and not realizing you cannot redistribute due to licensing constraints... :wink:


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Peter provided me with some stuff concerning logos

Adobe Illustrator and EPS format is attached as zip below
 
thanks a lot Tom, feels good to hear, that you pilots appreciate and shows, that we are on the right way - very far from the ambition.
 
[imgpop]http://www.frida-art.nl/barthe/flightsim/images/ACH_Events_Placeholder.png[/imgpop]Placeholder image for when there are no events for a long time. It would prevent the site from looking "dead" with a Xmas event in June.

I have some ideas about a new logo, as soon as the materialize I'll post some concept. But I think that when you want commercial quality where you can send people back to the drawing board multiple times, have a deadline, vote about it and have lots of criticism you should just hire a commercial web designer. For me it's just a hobby during spare time when I just want to have creative fun.

I think this is a choice to make first; do we want a commercial look like a real airline, a hobbyist fun look like FSE has or a bit in between like we have now? I would describe our current look as an austere look, a bit conforming. Some here say a bit dated but that doesn't really bother me.

I somehow missed the discussion why we actually need a new logo. Can someone clarify that?

This new site. Does this involve phpVMS?
 
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