Minecraft Forums

What words come to mind when one looks at the new Minecraft Forum Beta? 'Sleek'? 'Professional' or 'User-friendly'? Or are there more descriptive terms for the new design? Perhaps one might say the new design is 'glitzy', 'clunky' or 'kitsch'. It would depend on a personal sense of style to a certain extent, but there is always an objective component to website design.

The newbeta (emphasis added, seeing as this is not the final version) sacrifices the image of a professional, official, forum for all things Minecraft-related for an image of an, I assume what is meant to be accessible, user-friendly environment.

And yet I have lost all sense of uniformity with this new update. The logo stands out well and is a fitting redesign, but is overpowering in its contrast. The cubic sharing buttons seem like they'd be a nice addition, but the logo on each side is off-putting to the eye. The search bar, simple thug it may be, seems to belong to another website entirely, with flat shadows from a light direction that is not seen anywhere else on the website. It simply has too much contrast to be readable. I have been attempting to read several threads on this version of the website, and have squinted due to the intense difference in colour intensity and hue between different parts of the forum - the lime green buttons, the medium brown navigation areas are contrasted with an out of place white band that goes from one side of the page to the other, for no discernible reason. When mousing over the various subheadings of the forum (that is, News, Forum, Servers, etc.) the dark-to-light green gradient is replaced by an off-white banded gradient, which seems like a poor imitation of a green-coloured metal. The 'thread' of each and every thread is unnecessarily broken by the harsh brown dividers, which have added noise which is not present anywhere else.

While the background from the old forum is kept, it seems completely out of place here. Without that, I imagine that the only discernible part of the forum that would identify it as being about a specific game is the logo in the top left. To me, this is a tragedy. There are too many game-related websites that seem to hop on a bandwagon of being uniformly boring and flat, with generic buttons and fixtures that are completely unrelated to their subject. At least wikipedia was a pioneer on this front - the apparent lack of a theme, was in fact its theme. But the derivative websites that followed only adhered to a colour scheme, with a few enterprising members taking the design into their own hands and doing something different and recognizable. This can be found when looking at Minecraft wiki. The website as it stands is completely recognizable as being in reference to Minecraft. Without the logo, I aver that it would still be recognizable. Minecraft forum, while still maintaining that aesthetic, uses a different logo entirely - one which does not necessarily fall in line with the Minecraft wiki logo (or for that matter, many other official Minecraft art logo pieces). The old design seemed to strike a perfect balance - between flat elements and textured ones. At one point, it even included small 'caves' on the sides of the forum, which I found to be nice aesthetic additions. But this new design does not have very identifiable elements, to the point where it could be mistaken for any one of a number of generic forum websites.



My personal opinion is that Minecraft Forum should retain some of the textural elements that have come to define it and the game itself, as well as redesign some of the user interface to facilitate readability.

Thanks for reading~!

I share some of your thoughts, but remember, its a beta. Things are subject to, and will change.

I don't need stone/grass pixel image buttons and stuff to know what forum I'm on, I LIKE it better without too many image things. CSS: :D.

For the colors, I think the light blue should be replaced with white/light grey/light green, and maybe have less brown.

Just looked at the gradients...Aagh. It's graduated to the wrong shade of green. Perhaps an inversion, or just bringing the old texturing back, like I suggested in another thread.

And yes, please, bring the caves back. Those were cool.

But, he's right...As it stands, if you removed the logo and the content links weren't all obviously Minecraft, then this could be any forum with a green color scheme.