synthwavesquid wrote:
Achromalia wrote:
quirky off-topic subforum gijinka/mascot
w/ indecisively mediocre(?) design except they are a thinly veiled [recycled character]
offtopicgender pride flag just dropped
design is ok(?). imo i have no clue what would really encompass ot beyond some kind of "chaos"/nonsense theming
like maybe a chaos demigod who's also a total neet and forum troll
...well now we're walking on dangerous territory here because that partially overlaps with my taste in characteres and ergo risks me being extremely self-serving in my ideas
off-topic characteristics... im not exactly sure yet
i usually think of its interpersonal politics with titles and power and dramatic misunderstandings/objections/grudges, and of mildly polarized gmt-versus-user dynamics when theyre not necessarily at war or anything but people have problems with moderation choices and moderators' personalities/behaviors in general
but i dont really care for stoking that fire unless its an artistic narrative and that dramatized narrative has consequences from validating peoples' opinions or propagandizing something i dont think is even representative of the subforum anyway
some notes:
+ black and dark-grey and brown and burgundy, all of these seem like primary colors to focus on as a theme-- my color choices are really very on-the-nose from the website design and i think it's a fair-enough characteristic feature for representing off-topic users. i hoped to use black/grey/brown for something that "cloaks" or "hides" in the background or as a mundane feature, so hair and eyes and cardigans(?)/jackets seemed ok for that, but i think the actual little puppet mascot at the side would have burgundy eyes or something... in the meanwhile, burgundy would be the primary color of self-expression and taking up attention first and foremost, so i believed it should be "closest to the heart" as well as eyes and lips but i was not really into the secondary parts and left it at eyeshadow
+ yellow for those warnings/silences, using stickers seemed very intuitive and satisfying but then i realized i didnt know what to do with that. people will probably only ever see yellow because of some kind of forum infraction so i bundle it up with the idea of gmt moderation
+ green has been the most difficult for me, because the green is for very different things on the site... green outlines new posts and activity here in the "other" category of subforums, but in current relevant subforum politics we also have gmts who are viewed by some with suspicion. as a result i think of cuffs and collars as sites of control/suffocation, but green buttons are intended to represent both threads new posts (the ring outline) as well as moderator activity (the green dot beside the name of each gmt). notably, buttoning together and veiling the red-and-blue "expression and freedom" under the cardigan/jacket seemed intuitive to me
+ blue is the second-most difficult, because by now the color palette is a lot harder to organize and balance appealingly, but blue is typically representing normal user activity and a few other secondary buttons, so i tried a ton of things with the turtleneck sweater and jacket before settling on a dotted pattern that represents a multitude of individual users and their "dots"
+ for the puppet... the burgundy spiral eye is shaped with the community's dizzy disorganized disposition and the "you can never leave" meme in mind, while the green button eye is a literal button that would revisit the "post" button and the theme of new activity. the collar is probably green and/or yellow again. the "off" of "off-topic" is shaping the eye and the grin because i love doing that with letters, and the grin is stitched up because it just seemed to fit somehow, meanwhile the turtleneck collar is itself the "t" of "topic" and the zipper could somehow be the "o"
+ for the flag... the same color principles apply, i was super indecisive with it and went through maybe ten or eleven iterations before i gave up and left it with the overlapping green-tab and blue-cursor design, their meanings were hopefully easy enough to inferi do like the chaos demigod neet/troll thought, the puppet idea was meant to be something crazed and detached and very very lost, but i dont really have any ideas on where to take that myself
i can only hope it... actually i dont know what to hope for, maybe i will hope for whatever you hope for