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Hearts of Oak Promotional Website

The image is just a placeholder for now until we can get some better suited renders. I am working on getting my screenshot ability set up in the latest engine to get some better resolutions for it. I'll tweak the colors a bit to tone them down from straight white. It might be the straight color difference from the white to the darker text that is the real issue. We can tweak it pretty easily though.
 
I think it's a great improvement overall, and much closer to Ashinokami's concept art. :onya

The HoO logo is perhaps a bit small though, so I'd probably make it about 1.5 times larger.
The body text font looks a little out of place to me, and I'd rather see a serif font more akin to Ashi's suggestions. That said, it's definitely much more readable now.

Perhaps the main body would look better with white text on a dark-grey transparent background, like in Ashi's concept art?
 
I'm on the website atm. Tweaking and retweaking. Will have something to show monday when I'll be home on my better monitor. I haven't solved though background render problem since 3 weeks ago, when I realised DX11 doesn't work on my pc and couldn't get clouds shaded correctly. I'll photoshop it somehow for details in sky, but still I'm waiting to someone give me St Albans or Hoy with sails and in form that, being dumb artist that I am, could assemble it myself.
EDIT: here's last screenshot I had:
ScreenShot0003.jpg
 
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I set the transparency of the block background to 90% and that seems to take the coloration harshness out while showing a bit more of the background as well. Thoughts?
 
Ok, the latest version is up. It incorporates the upper nav bar that was in one of the last versions sent to me from @Ashinokami and the footer has the CryEngine and Wwise logos added as well. I am still tweaking site responsive layouts to make them appear better on mobile but it is a LOT better than the old skin.
 
Managed to load the page now! Looks nice and VERY different. Bit of a shame that you can't really see the ship at the moment.
And some of those "modern-looking" fonts near the top seem a bit out-of-place. Definitely making progress though! :onya
 
Looks better already, especially with the new header and footer bars. :onya
 
I just thought I'd share this comment from IndieDB regarding the new-look HoO site:
Right now, the font used in the website is quite hard to read. The letters are very elongated and close one of another and it makes it unconfortable to read if the text is more than a few words long.
Click to expand...
 
They will have to be more specific as to what browser they are using and what size of monitor, screen, etc. A lot of format issues are very much related to the browser being used and less so about the actual site design or font used.
 
Thanks. Hopefully it is something simple. I get a lot of this at my job where a customer will complain about something not working right or being unreadable on their end and when we ask them what their browser is they tell us 'Jimbob McGee Custom Browser' from some buried Google Apps location or link they got from their grandma on Facebook.
 
After the comments on IndieDB, I'm curious: which font is supposed to be showing as the body text on the site?
For me, it looks like I'm seeing a back-up font (see image), no matter how many times I refresh the page, and testing in both Chrome and IE.
HoOSite1.jpg
 
Alright, I have started to iron that issue out. What seems to have happened is the server was not serving up the font files that were attached to the page so it was either defaulting to a system version of the font (which some of us had them already and the site looked fine) or it reverted to 'modern' fonts like Pieter was seeing. I got the mime types fixed so it is now serving the corrected fonts and it appears we will need to adjust them a bit when I started using other devices to view the page. I don't really like the bold on the Bodoni font that much now that I am seeing it from a 'fresh' version and not from the version I had on my system that it was defaulting to.
 
Nice work mate, that is looking much better! :onya
 
HA! Modern fonts are gone. Much better, mate. :onya

Indeed that bold 'regular' text does look a bit odd. Could italics possibly work here?
 
Yep, I'm seeing the right font now, and I agree it would look better in normal weight instead of bold.
 
I've now updated the FAQ page on the site so it's up-to-date with the Wiki version, and fixed a few formatting errors.
I managed to display the categories so the questions can be sorted easily, too.
 
That looks great. I didn't even know it had that feature as part of the module, lol. How many people do we want to do a bio, all to the coordinator level as a minimum? At the least start with those and then anyone that wants to submit would be welcome to, is what I was thinking. Also what do we want the page to look like and how will we structure it?
 
Captain Murphy said:
Also what do we want the page to look like and how will we structure it?
Click to expand...

I hate writing Bios, but I reckon I can come up with something. As for the display of Bios on the web page, I have a couple of ideas. I am not sure how good they are though so I will just throw them out there. The first concept makes use of the ships wheel design in the Heart of Oak logo, fully intact wheel however. The actual bios would appear as thumbnails and ring the ships wheel on the balusters at the end of the spokes, and would rotate around as the wheel spins controlled by the mouse. Images would be visible as the wheel turns, with the current selected bio blown up to full resolution on the spoke that appears in the top center of the page. In the center on the hub we could have a nave plate displaying titles such as "Programming Coordinator" or "3D Artist." Of course it would depend on how many people want their bios on the page, but we could certainly have more than one wheel, or just add spokes. I am certainly no web page designer, but I think it would be better if we could do that with HTML 5 rather than with Flash, but I really have no experience with either.

My second idea is to use an old school world chart, or perhaps a woodcut map, with the bios placed in the actual locations that each of us are throughout the world. Perhaps have the bios represented with old map symbols and art that when you click on, they expand to the full bio. that would certainly show the international aspects of our development project, and also give it a good nautical feel. As for font's for the bios, it would be cool to use 17'th or 18'th century fonts, but they are a bit tough for some people to read nowadays. So we should probably use the same fonts we are using on the front page.
 
Captain Murphy said:
How many people do we want to do a bio, all to the coordinator level as a minimum? At the least start with those and then anyone that wants to submit would be welcome to, is what I was thinking. Also what do we want the page to look like and how will we structure it?
Click to expand...
All active Coordinators would be nice, though it should be voluntary in case some would prefer not to write one.

I've just looked through the Manage Profile options on the site, and it looks like we can set real names, prefixes (e.g. Dr.), suffixes and bios quite easily.
Maybe we should use the 'suffix' part for the team roles? Otherwise we're limited to stating our roles in the bio itself.
(BTW, some of the small text on that page is almost illegible with the bold font.)

In the Member Directory, I couldn't find many settings to change the layout, though I did notice an option to filter by 'group', with 'PiratesAhoy Team' being the default.
Not sure how easy it would be to change that for the individual team roles, though.
 
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