Thanks to Josh Leuze who tipped me off to this, it looks like bbPress.org is finally going to receive an overhaul with a brand new site design. The new design sticks with the same basic color scheme but the overall site gives a refreshed look and feel. My corny joke regarding the design is that there is a bug on the header.
I’m glad to see bbPress.org finally getting a much needed facelift. The only gripe I have about the design is that the forum gravatars are huge. I think having them a bit smaller would be the way to go. Please take a look at screenshot 1 and screenshot 2 and let me know what you think of the redesign in the comments.
I think that the new design is a good fit with the rest of the WordPress family, while still being original enough to stand on its own.
Seems like having a sharp looking website should help generate more interest in bbPress and give the impression that the project is maturing a bit.
But now that bbpress.org and the dashboard have been freshened up, Kakumei really stands out like a sore thumb ;)
I think the Gravatars, and other poster info looks sharp, but I can see how a series of one line posts with such large Gravatars could take up quite a bit more room than need be.
Wow, creative use of BB in the identity (Bee Bee).
Overall it looks great. Gravatars look a good size to me.
I don’t like the way they’ve added tags and the forum index alongside the latest threads, I’d prefer to see a more typical layout.
I don’t get why they’re using all these bees. It’s a bit corny IMO.
I’m with Ryan; I don’t like the “bee” iconography/analogy.
Although, visually, I think the redesign does really look good!
Thanks for sharing this info, Jeffro! BbPress was/is in serious need of a makeover, and this is a grand improvement.
While I agree that the gravatars are too big, a bigger design flaw is the iconography for the “topic resolved”/”topic not resolved” meta data. I love that they are trying to display that data visually, but I don’t think they are there quite yet, design-wise.
Also, along the lines of Josh’s comment, maybe this means they will start to think about re-writing Kakumei’s code to utilize relative CSS positioning… :)
Thanks for the feedback guys, I’ll keep on top of things and announce when the new design goes live. Heck, Josh will probably know before me.
It’s interesting that if you go back in time, WordPress.org contained a site design that is very similar to the design of bbPress.org. I guess the two projects share more than just code :)
@Toby – I didn’t notice those status icons before. They do need to tweak those icons, just using color to differentiate the status leaves them inaccessible to those who are colorblind or have a low contrast screen.
Just adding a plus and minus, or check and X would be an improvement. Though maybe they could push the metaphor with a bee sting and bandaid ;)