User blog comment:The Woolly Howl/Theme Update/@comment-3299695-20180520085241

Hi Wooly! It's amazing how much work you've put into the theme. But if I'm to be honest, the new theme put together is a bit too noisy. There's simply too much going on.

The background is okay, though the gang characters could be slightly smaller so that more of Berk could be seen (that's my personal experience from the Polish Wiki I run).

Navigation background image is unreadable (it's been after a while I could see Stormfly and Dragon Eye, then Hiccup and Toothless, and there's still a lot going on in the background I can't recognize). Because of the size and being shadowed by the dark red, that picture needs to be something simpler to read.

Imho you're heading to the right direction when it comes to article background, but again, dragons make it too noisy. I can't focus on what I'm reading with Nadders and Snaptrappers smiling to me from behind the text, plus there's too much of contrast in the background itself (dark yellow on the margins, white in the middle). Why don't you consider a simple yellow-paper theme (like the one of Dragon Manual, but without dragons)?

Round cursor is slightly confusing, but let's leave this one.

Sorry for being so critical. It's just, I've been following the design changes on this wiki for a while and I could stand them, but I can't anymore. I've seen a tendency to go into lots (lots!) of nice-lookinng and effective stuff, but now it's gone into being way too noisy. In my eyes it looks likt you tend to customize each element on its own but not looking at the general picture.

Remember about some balance. It's not about how many ideas for each element of the website you have, or the skills, but rather about putting it all together in a harmony so it looks nice. What I see now is blue and green background (with the colorful gang's dragons), yellow article background, red navigation bar, purple module border, white page shadowing, green buttons, plus a lot of different-colored templates... please think it through.

I'm willing to give some advices or help with the theme if you ever needed some. As I said, I've got some experience in that as a founder of Polish Wiki. For a time I tended to change every single thing on CSS (once I learned to customize it) and other MediaWiki pages, so the wiki was all colorful and elements were shining and moving and there were dragons everywhere, but the time brought an understanding that it's not the advanced that makes a website nice-looking. Sometimes it's the simplicity. The actual art of designing a page consisting of so many elements is, again, to find the balance.

Good luck :)