VB thinks we are all blind.

It occurred to me that the mindset of the designers over at vbulletin soultions thinks it's customers are all blind, partially sighted, or cannot grasp the concept of images being descrete.

I'll start with the tab-expanded.png marker that allows the toggle between the side panel. To me this sticks out like a sore thumb, or more to the point an extremely sore ear/ coffee cup handle. Wouldn't a 16px by 16 px marker been a little more appropriate?

Okay, I think we can forgive the over-sized passionately prominent toggle of death icon that sticks out like an ear on steroids. Note!! mr vbulletin solutions employeee there's a suggestion in the last paragraph.

onto the size of the buttons and over-sized text Post New Thread. Really, Do we need things such as this to be extremely large that spans a good portion of our widths?

And, I've saved the best for last. Those threadmarkers. Possibly the worst coloured,sized visually looking threadmarkers in all of vbulletin land.

With the size of these threadmarkers this tells me one thing whom designed this. You lack creativity, passion and the ability to think outside the box. I'm prity sure the excuse is "but you can change all this" well, let me tell you one of the few things I notice even on custom styles the threadmarkers are always left in place. Using stock images that come from the program used to create these is absolutely lazy.

My point being, this is just another area of development that the company people love so much think of you and know you'll accept anything they throw out. Just to put this in perspective. I could have designed all those graphics and colours in 20 minutes. Yet another preview of the gigantic threadmarkers and the whole design in general for what should have been the flagship of forum scripts on a visual basis.

I never thought that the whole visuals in 4.o could be as bad as 3.0 but it exceeds this in all departments. (below the threadmarkers which are an eyesore and taken from stock shapes in your everyday program)

Some people seriously need sacked over there.

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=\ The design is somewhat bad, doesn't seem like it was completely (I don't think it was) thought out. They use too much drop-down shadow, looks like they're trying to copy a MyBB design site (although I am aware that they possibly never even visited that site) who makes themes with huge fonts, huge images and huge thread markers.

 

ALL of which was mentioned time and time again, practically beaten to death, by the alpha team. When the beta team came onboard, they reiterated our cries - all to no avail.

Please Shelley, don't forget the smilies! My gawd they're the worst I've ever seen in my life. Ever. *shivers* :frown:

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Hmm yeah with regards to the smilies. With a little more refinement and a little more love taken to improve on these they could have turned out nicely.

But then, I did suggest and I'm sure the beta and alpha team did also (I didn't give you guys enough credit) what they thought we said was they look great don't do anything else to it we will settle for them. Oh well.

BTW this is in no way to carry on the bashing. I personally feel the visuals should have been passionately created and thought about. And, If I could have designed a style and graphics like that in under twenty minutes what in hell where the designers doing for the remainder. Marvelling at their own works and master pieces?

My last thread was locked so I think the visuals are well worth being highlighted as well as the code and other miseries of the 4.0 saga.

 

Isn't vB's new graphic artist that woman who also did the GUI? Maybe she likes big images, so to speak.

 

The only thing IB is passionate about, it seems, is making people pissed off :p

 

Well let's look at the facts. The designer was hired (outsourced) when the logical step (dumb morons) could have hired in house. Instead of hiring someone who is passionate about the looks and feel of the product they outsourced to someone who cares about their next big pay day. That, was their first mistake.

Secondly, Anyone, And I mean anyone who uses pre-made shapes from any graphics program is lacking creativity from the get go. There is a golden rule that stock shapes are widely over-used and look terrible to the extent that they look like something a 10 year old would design or someone who just started out using graphics software.

I mean, I recently sold a pack of smilies to a client (I've released over a 300 hundred packs). They could have approached me and I would have did it for free, because I'm such a nice person. LOL Yes, they are proud and this results in people getting something visually appalling.

Another thing that bothers me about the style is that I noticed some of the higher quality icons are on other sites (not related to vbulletin) I won't accuse without proof but are these royalty icons being used? I'd like to know whether each and every image was hand crafted from the ground up which would allow a better judgement. Inconcistency is another thing, some icons look nice, whilst others look appalling. Now there's one thing not liking a image ( we can put this down to the persons preference) but that isn't the case here, they are downright visually appalling in quality.

I don't really care who designed the graphics and style all i know is they should have done their job not a better job just do what they where hired to do to reflect on how much the community means to them.

 

Run out of things to complain about, eh Shelley?

Seriously, the size of elements of the skin are trivial. It's a default skin, it will more than likely be changed.

I thought that was the "Web 2.0" trend too? Make everything Bigger and more Flashy.

Also, vBulletin's Post New Thread button is barely bigger than IPB's. And it's postbit buttons are a lot smaller than IPB's, if not smaller than most software out there, including mine.

 

You think I'm complaining. Ryan. You don't think any of the points I highlighted have an validation? then you know nothing. we all know your a advocate and question any negative remark no matter whether it's validated you'll come up with something.

Oh I have much more, These are valid questions and concerns into why the visuals are terrible, inconsistent and somewhat something you would see from a designer starting out. I'm not comparing the style to IPB because quite frankly that would be an insult to ipb.

I'll make my points, I won't allow you to deter that. Let's keep on track shall we? Unless we are going for round 2

 

I'm not a big fan of vB 4's default look but then again I was never a fan of the 3 series default look. Over I like the look of 4 over 3 though. One of the first thing I do to get a new board rolling is install a custom style no matter the platform.

^That's coming from an 'uninformed' non-designer.

 

I have to disagree on the thread markers, although I *do* agree they should be a bit smaller. I like the design of them though.

The smilies are awful.

The overall design is not as bad as some are making out though. It's growing on me. Showthread is the main area needing work now, in my opinion. It just looks...rough.

 

Means more business for me anyways. So I won't complain. Shelley! You should look at the bright side! vBsmiley will be famous soon. The edited Fam Fam icon smileys don't stand a chance against you!

 

The thing is, if I could deal with small graphics like Shelley does, I wouldn't have made those thread markers like that at all. I'd have used soft pastel colors to accentuate the overall look of the software. I don't know who did the icons for Dave McHenry's photograph site, but they look good, better than what I've seen most premium skins come with.

 

I didn't say that they didn't have validation. I'm just tired of the sarcasm. If you could convey your points more like an adult and less like an immature teenager then maybe I could take you more seriously.

By the way, do not question my intelligence. I don't know everything, but I'm not the type of person to stand by and not challenge something that I find completely wrong.

Why would I comment if I agreed? If I have nothing of value to add, then I'm simply not going to say anything. Others are doing it for me. I'll step in when a point needs to be made, and not before.

However, my points are also valid. To make these comments that the buttons and images are too big is, quite frankly, ridiculous, considering the fact that their biggest competitor is doing the exact same thing.

 

Ryan,

You have this knack of demeaning people. You're not able to use that intelligence any other way, quite frankly. Remove your trivial characterizations and make your "valid" points.

 

WOW Ryan. I'm glad I'm not on your bad side - yet.

 

I don't feel Ryan is showing us his bad side. How are his points any less valid than Shelley's?

Shelley has raised some valid points in her critiques of vB4. And I support her right to do so, even though the depth of her recent critiques are sinking to the level of sorting fly specks out of pepper.

And Ryan has raised some valid points in his critiques of Shelley's recent posts.

I'm struggling to see any difference between the two. Edify me, if I am missing the finer points here.

 

Umm I don't believe that I said anything at all about Ryan showing anyone his "bad" side. I said I'm glad I'm not on his bad side. Nor did I say that either one's points were more or less valid than the other.

My post was teasing Ryan, which I'm surprised that you didn't pick up on Mike. :doh:

 

What ryan fails to realize is he knocks everybody's concerns. if you go take a ride on Santas sleigh, drop off at the log cabin for cookies and then read some of the replies he's made to people showing concern. He knocks it on every turn. Unless it's good feedback of course *jumps up and down*

We could all accept mediocre but what would the world be like? Anyway, you didn't say that my post had validation, true. But speaking of sarcasm have you forgotten.

Am I complaining or do I have your seal of approve validation? make your mind up. I will not change my style of posting for you, if you don't like the way I post set me to ignore. It's a feature that is very seldom used so I advise that you set me to ignore though in these general cases you want to read.

Now what seems trivial to you is not trivial for me. Yeah sure, we can change the look, but can't we also change the code? why the beginning of a re-write? why bother? because we have a level of standard to maintain so don't get on your high horse with me telling me that my concerns are trivial, they may be trivial to you but to the rest of the community it's not.

To me, that is another instance of selfishness on your part. You care too much about your own concerns and not others and if you seem they aren't that important then you'll go harrass that person. Let's not forget something here, you approached my posts first here. I could go on and I was going to leave this till tomorrow but it's just not in my nature to leave things unfinished (bit like vb styling engine) hey ryan, who would have thought that my nature and the styling engine have something in common?

Your mistake was to pick one of my posts which actually did hold true validated points. And your smarmy remarks to me in other posts won't go ignored.

Oh!! I get it, you didn't like the way I titled this thread? lol

 

That's the thing ryan, I don't want you to agree with me, I'd prefer it if you didn't. Maybe we can knuckle down come up with a few ideas, suggestions and thrash out a better solution? oh wait, golds released, the developers/team at vb.com don't listen even to the alpha team. We don't have much hope but we can share our concerns with others that share the same feelings around here.