Reply To: [THEME] Color-Pi v1.2 11/05/2015

[phrazelle]

Customization is cool, but 90% of the people that grab this won’t go down that road. With Simple being out there as a solid template to work from, I would focus more on polishing yours into the design you think is best.

Idk. There is no color of text that will look good over any random image. Based on the color and complexity of the image you will inevitably run into competing design. So again, I wouldn’t worry incredibly about someone being able to modify your theme at will.

All that being said, it is a cool idea making it easy to switch around if someone was so inclined. Are you talking about throwing it out there with a bunch of fonts/backgrounds/color schemes that you put together integrated? Maybe the files are already included in the asset folders and all the necessary code is added in and commented out? Because that sounds cool too. A theme that is actually a collection of similar themes or something.

If enough people can kick out full themes (I still need to round out Piulator, and I like my new Zelda theme) maybe they could get included as options on future RP builds. Then it’s less about making a unique one out of necessity and more about having options. I think that if there were a solid chunk of preset themes out of the gate, I wouldn’t have skinned any of my builds as far as I did. I just wanted more than Simple. (Not that it sucks, I just like variety.) More selection = less urge to create something new.

Per your current design, you could fade the background a bit (put it over a black layer in a design program and drop the opacity 10-20%) and get a lot more out of the text without adding content boxes. Maybe even just losing the white (highlights) from the background image. If the white areas were more grey I don’t think it would compete with the white text as much.

As for SVG creation, I use Adobe Illustrator, but there are a plethora of resources out there online that boast SVG creation. This free program looks legit: https://inkscape.org/

I suppose SVGs aside, scalability is really only an issue in the sense of 16:9 or 4:3. Someone correct me if I’m wrong here, but as long as you are designing in those aspect ratios at the largest possible resolution (something like 1920×1080 @ 96ppi for 16:9 and 1600×1200 @ 96ppi for 4:3,) the themes should scale down to lower resolution displays in their respective aspect ratios without issue. So you could always just make 2 versions and the user would grab whichever fit their application; 16:9 or 4:3.