Dear Apollonius,

are you generally proficient in design?

I would like to know... ;-)

Regards, Bussinchen

Well...I'm an artist, does that count?

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Loren-Hall...115454971839389

Why, do you need a forum header banner?

Alas, I'm not much good at WEB design, but if you need some custom art done either for the program or the website, then I think I can help!

Oh, dear Apollonius,

you are an artist! Wow! I had a look on your facebook site and I have also seen your web gallery, and I must say that I like your art very much! It is both abstract and not abstract at the same time, because sometimes one can see forms created by nature in your paintings, sometimes not. I really like the colors you are using. They are beautiful!

I asked you if you were proficient in design because I would like to know what you are thinking about the tango icons Scotty has put in the toolbar. The tango icons are for example used by Gnome/Linux. Some people, for example our Italian forum member GioRock had criticized them for being too much old fashion style, others, like me for example, do like them and don't think that the design of the buttons is such important, because we focus on the functions of the software, not so much on its design. So what do you think about the design of the buttons?

It would be great to discuss these things with you.

CU

[But yes. The ability to change and edit the tile font, the ability to resize the program, the ability to edit the dictionary, demo mode, board setting configurations that can be saved to a specific name, and the 3D mode make Scrabble3D much better than DZwords to me! The only things that really make DZwords better than Scrabble3D (at least right now) are the use of textured skins, customizable AI, and non-playable spaces. There are probably more things going both ways, but those are the things I have noticed so far.]

THANK YOU so much for taking a look at my artwork, and I'm so glad that you like it!

And I am not familiar with those types of icons, so they don't seem dated or tired to me. To me they look just fine! If you would like me to try my hand at making some custom ones, I'd be glad to try.

• Tango Icons:
To be or not to be - that is the question concerning our toolbar buttons:

If you as an artist have some good idea how to improve the design of the toolbar icons, please feel free to create some concrete samples, provided that you think that this would be nice to do, provided that you have time and are keen on doing that...

IDEA

Hundertwasser, a famous Austrian artist, designed the Hundertwasser Bible edition.

Why shouldn't we have a special Scrabble3D design preset, made by the American artist Loren Hall?
It would be great to have a preconfigured implemented "Loren Hall" preset for a new aesthetic, artistic look of Scrabble3D: board, tiles, icons, background, everything.

Wouldn't that be really amazing???

(As you can see, I don't think only about the Scrabble3D look Apollonius created before (skins, see his posting #1), but I imagine something really new in Loren Hall's own style.)

And...are you really saying that you would like me to design a custom skin, that might one day be packaged with the program? @_@
If so then I am deeply honored, and would do anything necessary to accomplish that.

Yes, I mean it. Provided that you would like to do it... You know, this is an open source project, and people who contribute to the program in some way, do it freely and voluntarily...

Not only you would be honored, but IMHO one day, it would really be a great honor for Scrabble3D, too, to get as a design preset a custom skin that has been created by a real artist.

But it is not yet possible to implement personalized custom skins, because just now Scotty is programming quite different things like improvements for the game server and other features that just now have higher priority than design improvements. There is still so much to do, you know; Scrabble3D is far away from being an accomplished project - quite the contrary! Scotty is constantly working on the program in order to improve it more and more...

Maybe you understand that design questions have a rather low priority just now. But this does not mean that design issues won't be relevant in the future, when Scotty will create even the 2D view in OpenGL...

But hopefully one day, as you said, custom skins might be packaged with the program...

Zitat von Apollonius

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And I am not familiar with those types of icons, so they don't seem dated or tired to me. To me they look just fine! If you would like me to try my hand at making some custom ones, I'd be glad to try.

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If you'd be glad to try to design a new icon set that potentially might be implemented into the program instead of the Tango Icons, you may do this... Maybe we should talk about it on Skype before you start working on it, if you really want to start...

But remind: Don't feel impelled to do it! ;-) Don't feel impelled to do it now!

I completely understand the higher priority being given to mechanical things! But I'm also very glad to know that there is an interest in the aesthetic side of things. That can be worked on in the background, in a way, while the other work goes on. Even if the ideas wind up getting scrapped I won't care, because such is the chance one takes! I will have fun helping either way. :)

And sorry to be so sporadic online! This weekend I will be at home, so it'll be like a mini-vacation! I should be on more Fri-Sun.

I'm excited to volunteer with this project, and actually have a few different skin themes in mind!

Zitat von Apollonius

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Even if the ideas wind up getting scrapped I won't care, because such is the chance one takes! I will have fun helping either way. :) [...]

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You have exactly the right attitude!
Of course, we must assess all together if your design ideas are well adapted to the functionality of the game itself... But I think it would absolutely be worth an attempt! I already imagine vaguely in my mind artistic Scrabble3D themes in Loren Hall Natural Process Painting style...

Zitat von Apollonius

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I'm excited to volunteer with this project, and actually have a few different skin themes in mind!

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Great! Awesome!

So do I! For the board and/or the background I have already in mind 4 season's themes in different colors and styles:
• spring • summer • autumn • winter
But of course design must be sufficiently discrete so that the tiles that are placed on the board still will appear distinctly and visibly.

Anyway, I'm really looking forward to seeing your sketches! Have you ever used image manipulation programs like Photoshop, Gimp or paint.NET?



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PS:
Never mind! Of course you need not to be online all the time! But I am glad to "meet" you in the forum, when you have time...

Zitat von Apollonius

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I'm excited to volunteer with this project, and actually have a few different skin themes in mind!

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sounds great!

Gero

This weekend was a little hectic, and now I'm back at my father's place.

It's hard to visualize what I want things to look like, so I think I'm going to just go at it with the idea that there will be pictures as backgrounds for the panels. I guess I'm also going to assume that there will be an image covering the program itself, the board, and the premium spaces. Without being able to actually wrap the image around the program to test, it'll be a shot in the dark for me to try and make that image. That part of the process might be best left until that option is available in the program (even as a beta demo), so that I'll know that the final work will be good. In the meantime I can always just put in a default image, as a kind of placeholder.

I can also start making a collection of premium tile textures! That might be a good place to start, actually.

I like the seasonal themed skins idea! I already have paintings called Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter, so I'll already have material to work with.

Maybe I'll just make some things, and we'll see which one turns out the best...?

Welcome back again after the weekend, dear Apollonius!

Let me tell you several things that might be important for you:

1. If you right click on the panels' green title bar, you will see a little menu where you can chose to transform the panels to standalones, i.e. windows that you can place outside the main window whereever you want on your screen or even on two different screens.

2. Please have a look on my screencast on 3D-Buchstabensatz für Deutsch and click on the little + in the spoiler's header. Then click on the smiley and you will see what a full 3D-cube looks like. The problem is that a specially designed backgrond in 3D must be very discreet, otherwise the view will be too busy (turbulent?). Even the premium spaces, which are semitransparent in 3D, must not be too busy.

3. You are right, when you say that it is hard to visualize what you want things to look like. So I think it could be a help to use some image manipulation program like Photoshop, Gimp or paint.NET, as I said before. It will not be easy to create an image that will visualize the ideas you have in mind, but maybe you will succeed anyway.

Let's talk more later, just now I have not so much time to write more than I did. ;-)

Best regards! Bussinchen

In my vision a skin will be a collection of tiles that are used for board background (choosable color currently), board foreground (currently choosable field colors) and piece texture (which can be set in the current release as well). In my opinion it's not a good idea to have different premium field textures. I don't like skins in terms of changing standard window behavior or GUI style. So I don't want to change the moveable panels. All textures should be merged into something that would be accessible like dictionaries or language. We could discuss if icons should be added to this collection or not.
It's not a big deal to make 3D view's background texturable but it will take some time to get 2D running similar.