[X] My Assistant

[SkyeLab]

WOW!! Nice one Doug............... , nearly fell off my chair when I logged on....

Brian

[nprev]

What a nice surprise, and a perfectly fitting tribute...very well done, Doug!

PB: Way to choose a birthday, you sly dog! Hope we're on Mars when you hit the big five-oh...

[Stephen]

OK, I guess it's up to me to play dissenter then.

While I like the new logo--and a well done is definitely in order there--I much prefer the previous colour scheme. It was much easier on the eye and (just MHO) distinctive. Also as someone else pointed it looks like the forum is in mourning.

Space may well be black (although the forum's new colour scheme looks more a kind of greenish-black than the jet black variety; but maybe that's just my own eyes), but I'm not sure that black is an appropriate colour for a forum with a subjet-matter like this one when the era we live in is one where money for unmanned spaceflight is so hard to come by and missions are either suffering cutbacks (eg MSL) or are not happening at all (eg the NASA's promised follow-up missions to next year's lunar orbiter, not to mention the perennial bridesmaid which keeps being left behind at the altar: the Europan orbiter). And all the more so if you tie that colour to Sputnik. It could be construed to imply that the Sputnik era was the dead pinnacle of unmanned space exploration we're all in mourning for rather than just the beginning of a bright new era in human accomplishment. That is, as if we're looking back toward a dead utopia rather than looking forward (and with hope) towards the future.

Just my two cents.

=====
Stephen

[djellison]

Just my two cents.

My 2 pence in reply - you're SERIOUSLY over analyising it by about 20 orders of magnitude.

The criteria are quite simple.
1) Is derived from the default
2) Doesn't look like complete crap. (A bit like crap is fine)

Here is the exact thought process that went on to come to the new logo

• Right..that's the upgrade for Invision 2.3 done. Oh - a new default forum skin.
• That's nice - a bit more 'sensible' that the light blue colours. I'll have to do what I did last time and make a UMSF banner derived from the Invision banner.
• Oh - October 4th isn't far away - I'll save it till then and put Sputnik in instead of the logo for a while.
• Oh crap - it's the 4th already....and I'm on a train...let's have a think about this Sputniks round.....0 is round..... 5=0 That'll work.
• Lunch time at work .... 'Josh - what do you think of this?' 'Nice!' 'I thought so as well - now what the hell is CSS again?'

Finished. If you're trying to invoke some sort of deep rooted subversive commentary on the status of exploration of space...you SERIOUSLY need to lighten up. I am not, for instance, about to look at the extension lead I'm using and go :

'hmm - a red led on it - suggestive of 'stop' and 'evil' - infering the suggestion that using too much electricity is a bad thing that contributes detrimentally to the state of our climate and counters my responsibility as a member of the global commuinty to be as low impact as I can and furthermore, by buying the cheapest extension lead I could find, I am funding the evil capitalist exploitation of low wage far eastern factory workers that once more, is damning of my efforts to be a globally social and environmentally responsible human...'

...no - it's just an LED - like that's just a logo, made in the laziest way possible.

The basic premise of always having the default skin with a tweaked banner is that as I'm not a code monkey ( as I've said about 1.6x10^58 times before) - I do know how to add skins to the forum, but I occasionally need the Invision tech support guys help . So I want to keep the forum as 'default' as possible to make the ammount of effort involved in maintaining it as minimal as possible.

If someone asked me what I thought the logo looked like I'd go 'Quite nice, simple, clean, a bit corporate perhaps, but nothing wrong with a bit of professionalism'

The theme's staying. If you want to use the old one - the option is there at the bottom left of every single page for you to select which one you want to use - but the old theme is designed around Invision 2.1 - and we're on Invision 2.3 - so compatability issues may exist.

If someone want's to make an Invision 2.3 theme all of their own - I'll happily install it - but the default theme will always be the default as installed with Invision...simply because, as a great guy once said - better is the enemy of good enough.

Doug