Why is this forum so... ugly?

• The icons look like they were ripped straight from Windows XP, some from Vista with those obnoxious gloss overlays.

• Color choices are, by design standards, just bad. White text on a gray textured background with multiple instances of completely different textures (the "ores" in the background image for this forum) make reading a general nightmare

• More shades of gray than that one erotic novel

• Aesthetic choices for hovering over/active certain areas of text were badly chosen. For example, hovering over "Members" or "Chat" causes the text to have a gaudy, ugly shadow that distorts the text.

• Because of the complete lack of a "buffer layer" underneath the icons/headings and pretty much no aliasing, a lot of "jagged edges" appear on the borders of the icons. This really shows on the IC2 icon, which by the way, is an awful icon at least by design standards (I'll get to that in a minute).

• Unnecessary use of italicized underlining for the breadcrumbs. That thins out the font, which is the last thing you want with a background like the one previously mentioned.

• Why is this used as the background image for the search bar? It also moves after its onFocus event.

• The banner overall looks busy - multiple layers of text and looks like someone just learned how to use the shadow effect.As far as the IC2 icon goes...
  
  • It's shamefully aliased. Whoever scaled it down manually to fit the page did not take into account that there is more to it than whipping out the resize tool and cropping.
  • I can't read the text on the bottom.
  • Isn't IC2 about modern society electronics and industry? The choice of a serif font makes this icon exude "outdated".

  
  Yes, I understand I could just click "Change Style"; the WoltLab defaults look miles better than the custom WBB Lite IC. But that doesn't make up for poor design of this one.

I'm not really talking about the actual reading parts of the forum, just the banners, page titles/header text and icons. Although I highly disagree with the choice to make every other post either light gray or dark gray - this is a technique used mainly for distinguishing small chunks of text, like each track in a playlist, not really for large sections of text.

Quote from Chocohead

If the forum is bad, I'd hate to see his evaluation of Minecraft.

Vanilla minecraft's textures and GUI is very well designed. Every single texture flows near perfectly into each other one, and given that the artists were constrained to a 16x16 pixel texture dimension, I can honestly say that i have yet to see a better job done. So how exactly is my evaluation of this forum's default style anywhere relevant or telling of my opinion of Minecraft?

Quote from SpwnX

I'm the only one that likes the darker grayscale of the forum?
It is easier on my eyes (luminosity).

I have little to no quarrel with light text on darker backgrounds (although, with this source backing me up, generally for paragraphs it is not a good idea), but it could be done a lot better, as shown by these guidelines. Generally, this forum's style has multiple different clashing colors that have no contrast unity - tens of different shades of blue for the banner is one example.