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How do you do, Obsidian Portal?
Hello, friendly denizens of Obsidian Portal,
I finally decided to do the smart thing and use Obsidian Portal to organize my notes and setting information for a campaign I plan on running online. I was lucky enough to run across arsheesh's HTML templates before I got too far and decided I would try to spiffy up my campaign a bit.
Before I start transferring content over, I'd like to get the layout and customization finalized (so I don't have to go back and edit every page after the fact), so at the moment the wiki is utterly devoid of content. That said, I was wondering if anyone would care to give their opinion on the layout and presentation. My initial concept was to present as an old scroll or tome of some sort, read by candlelight, with links and buttons as glowing arcane inscriptions - something with lots of texture and high contrast between dark and light.
However, I'm worried I went off the deep end and created some sort of unreadable abomination (light text on dark backgrounds is always dangerous, and I'm worried that "textured" may have become "cluttered"). I'm also curious to know if it even displays properly on other browsers and computers than my own, and what load times are like. I do plan to keep the actual pages fairly clean and ordered, with minimal images embedded, but any suggestions on the existing background and navigation bars?
Here's my home page (currently functioning as little more than a teaser): "Darkest Night":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaigns/darkest-night-d20
Thanks in advance for any tips or opinions,
- Ereshal
I finally decided to do the smart thing and use Obsidian Portal to organize my notes and setting information for a campaign I plan on running online. I was lucky enough to run across arsheesh's HTML templates before I got too far and decided I would try to spiffy up my campaign a bit.
Before I start transferring content over, I'd like to get the layout and customization finalized (so I don't have to go back and edit every page after the fact), so at the moment the wiki is utterly devoid of content. That said, I was wondering if anyone would care to give their opinion on the layout and presentation. My initial concept was to present as an old scroll or tome of some sort, read by candlelight, with links and buttons as glowing arcane inscriptions - something with lots of texture and high contrast between dark and light.
However, I'm worried I went off the deep end and created some sort of unreadable abomination (light text on dark backgrounds is always dangerous, and I'm worried that "textured" may have become "cluttered"). I'm also curious to know if it even displays properly on other browsers and computers than my own, and what load times are like. I do plan to keep the actual pages fairly clean and ordered, with minimal images embedded, but any suggestions on the existing background and navigation bars?
Here's my home page (currently functioning as little more than a teaser): "Darkest Night":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaigns/darkest-night-d20
Thanks in advance for any tips or opinions,
- Ereshal
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Comments
- Dan
"Avatar: Conquest of the Imperial Order":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaigns/avatar_adventure
"Duskreign’s Favorite CotM January 2012":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/wyrmshadow/wikis/012012
"CotM November 2011":http://blog.obsidianportal.com/november-11-campaign-of-the-month-avatar-conquest-of-the-imperial-order/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=november-11-campaign-of-the-month-avatar-conquest-of-the-imperial-order
DM, Current Campaign: The Godlands: Rise of the Blood Moon Kings
DM, Previous Campaign: Avatar: Conquest of the Imperial Order - CotM: November 2011
On your layout, really nice work. Used Firefox & Opera, and both came out clear- great feel.
killervp
"A God...Rebuilt":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaigns/a-god-rebuilt
"Duskreign's First Ever COTM":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaigns/wyrmshadow/wiki_pages/112011
Just trying to help out.
-Jaymes
"Changing History":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaigns/l5r-changing-history
-Jaymes
Campaign of the Month Febuary 2013
Thanks for the welcome and for taking a look, folks. :)
Overall, first impressions? Looks great. You seem to have a good eye for design and code.
This one is a must watch.
Mike aka Black Vulmea
"_Le Ballet de l'Acier_":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaigns/le-ballet-de-l-acier - swashbuckling adventures in the age of the Three Musketeers and Captain Alatriste
Featured Campaign of the Month - August 2011
I fiddled with the wiki structure for a while (built some dummy pages and tested various layouts) and I think I've arrived at what I will use:
Since the sidebar already links to the primary hubs, I'm going to leave the "main wiki page":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/darkest-night-d20/wikis/main-page as little more than a quick'n'dirty campaign summary, with small duplicate links at the top for folks who may not be able to see or use the sidebar. The home page I will leave as a sort of "movie poster".
The main hubs though (Life, Locations, History, Hellspawn, Rules, and Appendices), I'm going to have a bit of descriptive intro text, then button-graphics that link to each subsection, then additional information below as necessary. Something like "this":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/darkest-night-d20/wikis/hellspawn . I experimented with having the button-graphics in a column or double column on the right and the text flowing on the left, but it looked a bit odd (too vertical I think, maybe if my buttons were landscape instead of portrait...)
I'm not sure that its apparent that the button images are links , so I plan to reinforce that notion by consistently making any link-image look like parchment pages while purely decorative images will be normal.
Game Designer, Pro GM, multiple ENnie Award winner
GM of Planejammer: The Spelljoined (Pathfinder 1e) Campaign of the Year 2011 and still going strong!
GM of The Planewalker's Guild (Pathfinder 1e)
Need a GM? Book me today!
Nice dark gothic feel to the place!
The proposed layout for the main hubs is DELICIOUS!
twigs
"I met a traveller from an antique land....."
CotM May 2016: Mysteria: set in Wolfgang Baur’s MIDGARD.
Previous CotM Aug 2012: Shimring: High Level Multiplanar Campaign
Inner Council Member
Gah! TinyPic moved one of my button images already... now I have a nice "This image has moved or been deleted" button in my sidebar. LOL
If I pony up for Ascendant membership to get the extra storage space, is there a way to host the images locally on OP? Or if not, how does everyone generally go about such things? Clearly TinyPic is not a good choice.
Not just the local storage but it'll do batch uploads as well. No more doing each image one at a time and having to fill out Captcha questions. Should've ascended right off the bat!
Thanks, Hurst.
"The Circle of Light":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaigns/the-circle-of-light