The State if the PB Design Community

[Shine]

Aug 3, 2010 23:45:47 GMT -8 tovarisch said:

News flash, Illustration falls under the umbrella of Graphic Design

You mean you grew out of making ---- sigs or forum skins, which is more web design.

Meh, semantics.

[Xylish]

I do agree. Most of us old timers are leaving to University and such that we've pretty much left the forums and for me, I had to gave up design in order to compete in a health sciences undergraduate degree in order to get into Dentistry.

Now that I am in the course and enjoying it, I'm still finding little time to design and a reason to go back into it..both habit and interest wise. (I have to admit, it's been 4 years since I have drafted SZ version 1 and version 2. My skills have gone rusty).

Also is the matter of planning and executing the design. You can design all you want on the forums but in the end, the function still stands out more than the actual aesthetics and a fine balance needs to be achieved.

Plus, planning the design and making it takes a toll on the designer and coder itself. Chris and I have spent almost 3 months drafting, planning before making v1/v2 which took almost half a year to complete.

Nowdays, you have the huge social media shift, instant information and tons of media to consume which sees many users not really want to go into design as part of their hobby.

Lots of factors lead to the decline in interest in design...but I'd be happy to see a fresh, new design community to add to the spice to this old Proboards system..(which really needs a huge update for customizability...)

[webmaren]

I lean more to the coding side of ProBoards design work, and I'd like to share my own experiences with the platform and why it never had a lot of staying power with me. I think that these reasons apply to the community at large as well.

A few people have said before that the dearth of coders was a major contributor to the downfall of the ProBoards design community. I also believe this to be the case, because a lot of skin design is predicated on having someone available to code it together. These opportunities fizzled as a result of factors both in the community and in the platform and as a result of natural effects that occur when a community like this reaches a point of maturity.

First, I'll echo the point made numerous times about a breakdown in the learning curve at ProBoards. In both design and coding communities, the "leaders" of those groups were not very connected to the new members, and as a result those newbies didn't have any sort of mentoring process. This is critical, especially on the artistic side of the community. With coding, its somewhat possible to learn by reading others' code and adapting it to your own purposes. This is extremely difficult to do with graphics, because the final piece is a result of hours of adjustments and layers that are pretty much hidden at the end.

Some of the blame for the degradation of the community, I feel, also lies with the ProBoards platform itself. This situation I feel does not get much discussion here, possibly because of a feeling that it is a step too far to criticize ProBoards on its own support forum, but I feel it does need to be voiced. Proboards had a huge draw for developers in the past because it was an innovative system that allowed a lot of freedom with its javascript skinning interface. A lot of skins were made using approaches that work very well with such a system, but eventually the community looked for ways to do more. Around this point, ProBoards began talking about Version 5, which got the coding community very excited. It offered us a lot of freedom. Because of the promise of V5, a lot of us began to cool down and work on fewer projects, not wanting to waste the effort on the legacy system when V5 was just around the corner (or so we believed). We waited, and waited, and nothing materialized. At this point, it was incredibly difficult to produce innovative codes that would load quickly enough to not be annoying to users, so many of us coders found ourselves without anything to produce.

We waited on the V5 API to appear, and we waited long enough that we lost interest when it didn't. Coders migrated to working on other projects that offered better setups. Some competing providers were offering the features promised to coders in V5, and we worked with them. If Pat doesn't want to hear me talk about how his competitors are weakening his pool of independent developers, fine. But it needs to be said, because this is a very real consequence of the glacial speed of V5 progress--at least, the apparently glacial speed--and it has severely weakened the ProBoards design community by draining it of coders.

The last reason that coders stopped appearing on ProBoards is something that naturally happens in the life cycle of an API. There were no more add-on codes worth writing. Everything that needed to be done, well it pretty much had been done four or five times over, and there was no point sinking effort into doing it again.

However, I think we have a shot because some of these factors can be reversed. If V5 releases sometime soon (as we've been saying for a long time), we'll have a renaissance of coders. ProBoards still has a giant userbase, which provides a strong incentive for developers to return once they actually have something to do. HTML5 and CSS3, which are finally seeing broad implementation, also offer a lot of new possibilities for developers. The Google Font Directory looks very promising in letting us break away from "web-safe" fonts. Depending on whether V5 offers any server-side APIs, we could see a lot of potential with AJAX and the various JavaScript libraries.

A lot of this hinges on having a quality community of designers to train the new folks. A lot of this hinges on V5 being released before that community finally dries up in its entirety. However, I am optimistic.

[VvaderV]

I have not been able to get on to help budding designers for a long while due to a job change, where as if all things go to plan i can start designing again, my skills on PS are a little rusty too. but I'm now a designer again on and off in my new job using illustrator, I'm past the uni stage and have a full time job but really enjoyed helping people to design and also doing the odd Sig etc myself, I used to be able to get on from time to time to see some of the 'old' designers work, I will try and get back on to help as much as i can, as i said if all to plan i will be able to help out more

V

[Quacker Jack]

I personally feel bad, seeing as I'm not so much the designer but the design community follower. I have personally made 3 efforts to collaborate, protect, and rebuild the design community, but it failed because (1) some people feel the need to be in charge, and (2) it just died off. While I feel bad, I can't say I didn't do anything.

[Stinky666]

A lot of people don't wish to design - full skins - for PB because at some point -soon- there will be a new version which ultimately, would screw everything up.
Also, to add to that, designers need coders to help them. Sure there are plenty of great free codes out there, but for a designer, you need a great coder to help you with new ideas to make the impossible possible.
The latter reason also applies to the former. The coders - and I don't blame - don't wanna do some epic amazing codes, for them to be broke.

[Allan]

Aug 23, 2010 8:20:36 GMT -8 Stinky666 said:

Also, to add to that, designers need coders to help them. Sure there are plenty of great free codes out there, but for a designer, you need a great coder to help you with new ideas to make the impossible possible.

thats the problem i have.So i stay within the bounds of codes i can get from here and other sites.Which sometimes makes it hard to acheive the look i have in my head lol.