Staff

Past Staff

Review for Graceful Lament

There are three types of blocky/funky layouts: those that “work,” those that don’t and those that are in between. Yours is the latter. As much as I like the combination of blue and green, I don’t think that they are balanced effectively throughout the layout. As much as I like the shapes in the banner, they leave empty space in the margins. And as much as I like shapes, they’re only in the header and footer, and not the content area.

Information

Site: Graceful Lament
Type: Resource
Owner: Tsuki
Reviewed By: Megumi
Date Received: 3/03/06
Date Completed: 5/27/06
Preview

Presentation

Layout

Color: The blue and green flow nicely in the banner, but in the content and navigation areas, they get “clumped” into large areas: the navigation is entirely green, the content has a blue background, but is mostly white. I recommend making either the navigation headers teal, or the links have a light-blue background. The background is blue; to offset the vertical stripes in the background, add some opaque green horizontal stripes—you’re contrasting colors, why not shapes as well?I don’t like how your content area is white; you’re already using white to define borders, so using it again in the content area is slightly misleading. Since your navigation is a light green, a light blue would work well in the content area. Nothing too deep; just enough to distinguish it from white.The “greater” background—the dark green one—largely tips the balance of color in favor of green. Since making either blue or green would unbalance your color scheme, try a neutral, “in-the-middle” sort of shade, like #6B8879; that’s also the color directly in between the top left corner of the content, and top right of the navigation.
Position: This may just be my penchant for balance speaking, but off to the left you leave a gaping green space to the right. Since your layout is so small, on any resolution it’s overwhelming.
Banner: An outer glow can be used effectively on graphic-intense background, but on a mainly solid-colored one like yours, it looks messy. Compare your layout to the image below, which contains the background I suggested and the removal of the outer-glow:

Anyway, the actual banner has visual interest, but only in the center, where the vector-shapes are. An artist usually does not leave white space on his canvas, and the messy, outer-glowed edges (also, the shapes are outer-glowed; consider removing that effect for a neater look) are like white space. A bold pattern wouldn’t provide eye candy for when the visitor’s eye strays from your focal point. Or, you could move your affiliates to that empty space. You’d have enough room to line up their full titles, one on top of another, in that space directly above the content.

Finally, the “V.7″ can be mistaken for “V.1″ so a clearer font would reduce confusion.
Footer: the shapes take up about an inch of space, which, while not really critical, could be put to better use. If you flipped the image to the other side, under the navigation, it wouldn’t leave as much gaping empty space around it.
Miscellaneous: Your content headers have a serrated border. Borders are fun, but you don’t have a serrated border on anything else in your layout.
In summary, your layout looks like it should be simple n’ clean, but the outer-glows make it look messy and more graphic-intense. Removing all outer glows would help you achieve the look that, while it may not be the thing you were aiming for, I think it would look nice.

Coding

Wordpress is fairly restrictive in its ability to display coding, so I’ll try to be brief here.

You have two stylesheets, which is fine, but one of the tags is outside of your header—actually, it’s outside your HTML document entirely.
You define a lot of attributes in the HTML tags that you could define in your stylesheet; for example, you specified every margin in your body tag but in CSS that would have been as simple as body { margin: 0; } .
You assign IDs to things like tables and they don’t have a corresponding CSS selector.
You use the rather infamous p class="head". This isn’t so much wrong as a matter of personal taste. Using a paragraph tag as a header makes it less distinguishable from paragraphs if a visitor viewed your coding; and also, using the h1 tag is simply shorter. (To define h1 in your stylesheet, use h1 { property: value; }.) Again, this isn’t technically wrong but it’s a good practice to really think about what each HTML tag was created for.
Another much-debated argument is divs vs. tables. This, coincidentally, also depends on personal taste. And, even more coincidentally, using divs will shorten your coding, just like h1. I’m not saying you have to, or even you should, but if you’re looking to make your coding shorter and easier to understand, divs trump tables.
I don’t understand why you have the cursor change when hovering over bold text. It makes me think that the bolded text is a link.
Instead of using paragraphs for actual paragraphs, you use the line break (br). The reason that people use the paragraph tag instead is that is puts spaces in between your paragraphs, so you can read them more easily.

Content

Site Related

Home: Yet another controversial point…a contest banner, at the top of the page no less. Putting it at the bottom, below your updates, would be an instant improvement, but then it would look awkward next to your larger, square hosting banner. Would it be possible to make both banners the same size, so that they look neat?It’s puzzling that you use pictoral smileys as well as the simpler keyboard ones. If this was American Pixel, I’d vote off the picture ones. They’re just too big for your text and produce odd gaps between the lines.Your writing “tone” seems very improfessional. This may be on purpose, but step back and think about what you’re trying to convey about yourself through your writing, or what you’re trying to convey about Graceful Lament. If you like your tone as it is, keep it. If not, scrap the pixel smileys and change it.
Link In: It’s great that you’re so enthusiastic, but you’re using an awful! lot! of exclamation marks! when some sentences really don’t merit them.Since you have a little padding on the right of your 88×31 buttons, you could either space them out, or center them. Your 480×60 buttons are centered, but I have a problem with them, too: they’re 300×40 pixels. Which is odd. Furthermore, I’ve never actually seen anyone use something that big, so I don’t know if they serve a purpose at all.
Links Out: Look at this page through a visitor’s eyes. Are you overwhelmed? I am. Instead of using a table (with a serrated border!) for everything, break your links up into groups: affiliates, graphics sites. I think that brush, texture and tutorial sites would belong on the credits page, since if you like them, you’ve probably used them before.
Awards/Gifts: “Awards we got”? You’re not getting the grammar award. This is right up there with ain’t. Anyway, it’s nice that you’ve listed the site’s name and the award’s name, but a well-placed thumbnail wouldn’t go amiss either. That way, if a visitor saw a really pretty thumbnail, they would be more inclined to view that than the ugly one right before it.
Contact Us: The road to bad reviews is paved with small comment forms. Please, make the fields bigger so that visitors won’t have to scroll when typing thins in, and can view the rest of their message easily. Also, you misspelled “fields” in the footer: “fileds.” I’m glad you give out individual emails, but I’m not sure what “blind mail” is; and you should consider putting the spam notice on top with the rest of the email information.
Recommend Us: Whoa. This is a good idea for publicity, but it may bring you bad publicity. People could easily interpret this as you being pretentious. I’m not saying I do, but…watch your back.

About

Most of this stuff seems pretty site-related to me. “Credits” and “Terms of Use” are not really about anything, any more than the previous set of links was. And when think about it, aren’t your graphics more “Site Related” than anything here? Your site is a graphics site, so graphics are pretty darn related. Huh.
Domain History: Does it seem odd to you that you have a “About the Domain” header within your “Domain History” page? I think that the appropriate title would be “Site History.”"About the Name” doesn’t really explain how you got Silent Lament in the first place, unless you picked it out of the blue, which is a possibility.”…was founded and currently co-owned…” is awkward. There should be an “is” before “currently.” You spelled “Attempt” wrong in the “First Attemp” header.
Staff/Crews: The road to bad reviews is also paved with non-aligned avatars and Aethereality plagiarisms (”Crews” sounds a tad familiar…). Also, Miko’s name doesn’t get a fancy header like everyone else. Unless you just don’t like him/her, I’d say it was an honest mistake. (I’d also say The road to bad reviews is paved with good intentions, but I’ve beat that to death.)
Past Versions: There are only a few minor errors on this page. One: Your thumbnails are two big for your tiny content space; two, there isn’t any padding around them so the text really hugs them; three, it’d be niced if you bolded the subtitles like the credits and artist. Kudos for listing the credits, by the way.
Credits: The links are so far apart that they look like little headers. A suggestion would be to make a list with regular spacing between links. Otherwise, “Brushes and Textures” doesn’t get a blue, serrated!header.
FAQs: Other than not bolding “Can I link you?”, this is quite a nice page. Your questions are relevant and not ridiculous; good job.
Terms of Use: I know that the rules can change at any time, but unless visitors re-read the whole page, they won’t know. It’s good to provide a last-updated link for pages like this, so visitors can easily tell if a rule has changed. Also, you repeat several rules in the different sections.

Network

Why does this header have precedence over your graphics? Really.

Designs

Wow. You have a lot. I’m just going to list the ones that caught my eye, common problems and miscellaneous complaints.
What’s Your Flavor: Can’t read the text, content is monochrome, can’t read the title, banner doesn’t match the rest of the layout. Slam, bam, thank you ma’am.
Many, many layout have banners that are simply too big. I started listing them, but stopped once the list upped ten. The visitor should not have to scroll to view the content.
Somewhere I Belong just doesn’t work. The simplicity doesn’t match the detailed picture, there’s a lot of wasted space and pink is not Dark’s or Daisuke’s color.
I do like the orange Untitled; my only complaint is that the text is hard to read.
Some of your layout’s titles don’t make sense, like Cosmic Mars.
Obsotescence? Think about it, would you really like a premade with the word Obsotescence on it?
Ruby’s layouts seem the weakest. Alluring and Shinobi for Hire are glaringly bright, and Pool Party and One True Pairng are too “simple”, in a way that doesn’t work. Some of her blended layouts, like Serene, have pretty but overlarge banners. Composed has neither aesthetics nor image size going for it.
Enchased just looks sloppy. Take a good look at it and I think that you can find things to improve.
Running just needs to be deleted. The blood-red color scheme is overwhelming, there’s no visual interest and it’s too big.
King of Treasures has a typo. You spelled it King of Treatures. How is that possible? Furthermore, it’s too large for smaller screen resolutions.
I do like The Pig, and the only thing I can whine about is that the iframe is about an inch too long for the image.
Party looks like it was intentionally made too wide, but why? Plus I can’t see the scrollbar in Internet Explorer so I don’t know where I’m going.
I don’t think that Frame of Mind really needed to be grayscaled, or why you turned it into an iframe when it could have been a perfectly respectable div layout.
Almost all of Tsuki’s iframe layouts take up the whole screen, which is Not a Good Thing. Not only is it not easily viewed by users with lower resolutions, it can’t capture the visitor’s eye with one focal point.
Popup layouts are my least favorite type, and I don’t see anything outstanding in this section. Sweet Silence and Winged Wishes use gradients when a more detailed background would have suited the image. Ethereal Indigo and Last Prayer are blurry and grainy, respectively. And how is the color indigo ethereal? (And why did you use this layout to point it out to me?)

Wallpapers

Again—wow, what a lot of wallpapers.
I think that Shadow’s wallpapers have potential. His/Hers have a focal point, and aren’t overwhelming, which is something most of your other wallpapers lack.
Some of them are just images pasted on backgrounds, some are sloppily blended images on backgrounds, and some are one-color images on same-colored backgrounds with same-colored text.
I do like Kagome’s wallpaper because there is a focal point, but just because the image is the center of attention doesn’t mean that you can make it extra-large and neglect the background (a soft pattern would be nice).
This wallpaper is my favorite, because of the work put into the vectored background, and the fact that it wouldn’t clutter up my desktop.
A lot of Sam’s wallapapers are busy and cluttered. You should still be able to look at your desktop icons with a wallpaper, but not with Sam’s.
I wouldn’t use any of the abstract wallpapers because, quite simply, they lack aesthetic appeal. Some are too glaring, some are too monochrome, and the last one doesn’t seem to have a lot of thought put into the theme.

Avatars

I don’t like how you have different-size avatars. What if I saw a 50×50 avatar that I loved, but I wanted it in 100×100? If you just supplied 100×100 avatars, visitors would be able to find and avatar, and resize it themselves to the size that they want. (This would require you editing your Terms of Service, by the way.)
Tsuki’s avatars are decent, Shadow’s are cluttered, Kero’s are too monochrome, Sams’s I actually like. Phew.
In general, your new avatars are better than your old ones. Consider pruning some of the really old, outdated ones.

Templates

Sadly enough, the era of templates is at its close in the webdesign community. People are becoming more and more attached to simple 100×100 avatars. And the customer is always right, right? Consider supply and demand, how many people are really demanding your supply?
Go through your templates and think about how many the visitor could make themselves with little difficulty. The answer is, most of Rima’s. Prune any templates that are so simple they aren’t worth downloading.
It’s thoughtful of Kero-chan to put an image in the template, but this also makes it hard to look at the details in the template. Consider a light grey background like Rima’s.

Resources

Now call me silly, but weren’t the past four sections all resources?
I don’t see what these banners could be used for. They’re too small to use as a layout banner, too wide to use as a contest banner and way too big to be a link button. So what gives?I see little variation among them. Abstract background, image. Abstract background, image. If you want to keep them, you’ll have to spice them up a little so visitors don’t get bored.
The only brush that really impressed by was Ruby’s Hearts. The others were generic (Dots) or easy enough for the visitor to make themselves (Scatters and Starfield).
I quite like your textures. They are just what textures should be…emphasizing a particular detail that the user would like on his or her image. Good job.
I like your PNGs as well. They are reasonably well-extracted, not puny (though a little bigger wouldn’t hurt) and easy to use. You’re on a streak, here.
Series Reviews seem out-of-place in a graphics site. You have so many reviews that seperate site would be understandable. However, I’ll review a review for a series I’ve never seen before, Bleach:You say that Ichigo has “spiritual powers” never explaining what they are. You say Rukia is a “shinigami” and I, the ignorant NonJapanese person, don’t know what a “shinigami” is. Overall, the whole summary could use some more detail; grab a staff member who’s never read the series and let them ask questions. Your review was pretty well-written, though, although saying “they all suck!” isn’t really a great way to make your point. My review of your review is 7/10. (I’ll take a point off for not having the sort option of sorting by score.)

Final Statement

Graceful Lament needs two things. One is priority; should your network, and “about” pages really come before your graphics? Should “Links In” be the second link in the navigation? The other thing you need is balance. Many of your graphics are either radically simple, or hopelessly cluttered. You and your staff need to find the medium. There should be a focal point to your art; there should be a background. There should be a balance between quality and quantity (your layouts). Good luck!

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 25th, 2006 at 8:08 pm and is filed under Graphics/Resource. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Comments to “Graceful Lament”

Kycoo Says:
June 25th, 2006 at 11:51 pm
Hey, I was just randomly reading your review and realized that the 480×60 buttons in the “Link In” section are actually thumbnails sized at 300×40. You have to click on them to get the actual size. Just wanted to point it out. Sorry if you already figured that out or something…

Megumi Says:
June 26th, 2006 at 8:20 pm
Oh, I see. Apologies for the mistake.