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New Game Maker Community Theme

GMC Design - August 2011

YoYo Games have updated the default forum skin at the official Game Maker Community.  The new, much darker, theme is pretty much a complete overhaul and features a grey top navigational bar similar to that introduced on the main YoYo Games website last month.

Whilst the most apparent change is the jump in colour-scheme from green and white to grey there are other noticeable changes with a new GMC logo and post icons.

There are also some pretty major problems – the most important one being that the new theme does not have a login form or direct link to login anywhere on the main page. The register link is missing as well. These links are absent as the page source code indicates they are constituents of the grey top bar, which is supposed to function as a drop down menu, which does not work.

Don’t like it?
Forum moderator tangibleLime writes that “in a week or so” a topic will be opened in which forum members can share alternative forum themes compatible with GreaseMonkey.

I’m not a fan of light-on-dark designs – they strain my eyes – so was pleased to see that it is still possible to revert back to the previous design. The theme switcher at the bottom of the page provides options of “YoYoGames” and “IP.Board Mobile”. Switching to mobile and then back to “YoYoGames” brings back the green theme which was in-use until earlier today.

The last major GMC refresh took place in June 2010 alongside a much needed update of the Invision Power Board software used to run the forums. Prior to that the forum was mostly blue.

What do you think?

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15 Comments

  1. There’s actually been studies showing that white on black is more strenuous on the eyes. But don’t expect YYG to understand that. According to a post from Mike Dailly a lot of this is due to YYG trying to aim for a more “professional” look. Which, to me, is funny because the new site and theme look even more childish than before. The old site had a lot of problems but it’s not like it looked unprofessional. But to be honest, the last thing they need to be worrying about is their theme or website, it’s their product. But again, don’t expect them to understand that.

    • You need to remember, that there are ‘programmers’ and programmers.

      I don’t like dark background on websites because for example images are usually made for white background, and on dark one they can look ugly (especially transparent PNG and GIF which can show some glitches). Also changing background color after website is working several years can give some issues – imagine that some people used gray color for some posts text, to write something less important – now it will be not visible at all on website… it’s not bad if website have dark bg from beginning, but changing it when there is 2 500 000 posts is VERY BAD IDEA because some content can become unreadable now.

      YYG should hire better designer for sure…

  2. Is there anyone on the face of this planet that actually uses the Hello Kitty theme? I set it to if for all of 10 seconds and my eyes start watering.

    I haven’t seen a programming tool that defaults to light-on-dark since I programmed in qbasic for my intro to programming class (Which I admit, was more of a white-on-light than anything else).
    -Elmernite

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