I thought the making of RG was at a halt. I'm glad it's not. Excuse my unorganized wall of text ahead.

I like the layout design wise, but some parts need some fixing. I'll work from top to bottom.

Couldn't that big empty black bar serve as space for some sort of banner, or at least for it to say Retrogade? And then use the following white section with all the navigation buttons could be expanded. The links in Participate definitely need to be made into small images or buttons, since it's the main way to navigate the site. Info and Support can stay how they are.

The search, if you wanna put one in the front page, I'd make it just a little smaller, and why not perhaps add a little tab to browse different types of submissions (digital art, photography, etc.), very much like DA has?

I don't understand the difference between the Showcase and the featured submissions, so I can't really comment on it. Is it randomly chosen entries? Randomly chosen high scoring entries?

The shout outs seem fine, but you could limit them to so many lines and allow for 4-5 shouts in there.

Recent Retrogade Activity is a fine thing to have, but I wouldn't place it on the front page. I'd stash it in a stat section like we had on Retrogade (the one with Who's Online, Top Users, etc.).

Anyhow, great work. I like all the little details and features, like the "hide" on each section, or the icons on the announcements for replying to it or etc.

two issues/suggestions:
the header is huge. including the ad space, i estimate that's pushing 400px -- pretty big chunk of monitor space for even the largest commonly used resolutions. compressing it would maybe make the browsing experience...i dunno, less intimidating. in disagreement with mr. nacho up there, i think keeping those links as texts would overall maintain the sleek, accessible feel, but i think they should be emphasized or contrasted from the background a little more, somehow. reducing the size of the search function and placing it in the general vicinity of the login box might look good...i don't have a specific vision but maybe that's just vague enough of a description to work with.
along the vein of compressing the scrolling space, i think five posts and comments for each section in "recent activity" would suffice. personally, i don't think i'd use that section at all, and for reasons i can't quite express i believe it'd be more practical to cut those down a bit, but it's less important to me than reducing the banner space.

one question:
is this a preview generated on a windows computer only, or will it display uniformly across all platforms? seeing as the layout is entirely css based, apple computers will display it slightly differently (not too significantly, but noticeably) and i'm curious to see any font rendering changes from os to os. this is relevant to me as i use a mac, and the old layout was rather squished together in text-heavy portions.

looking good.

By that big empty black space I'm assuming you're talking about that part between where it Says "RetroGade 5.2" and the "Register Now!" link? I didn't put anything in there because I wanted it to work as sort of a contrasting area between the head and the body. It'll make both those areas pop a little bit more as far as dominance. If I did move the RetroGade part into the black, which I tried before and didn't really like, it would leave the navigation area kind of log sided. I could try to move the "Participate" links over to the left some and make them into buttons or something and see how that works.

The search I wanted to put right there out in the open and in a very obvious and easy to find place. Simply because that was something which I had always hated about the old RetroGade, the search was hard to find at times. I was intending for that search area to be at the top of every page and that black line that the box is in is also a different shade of black than the background. I was intending to stretch all the way to the right to break up the extra background on the right side.

As far as that tab thing goes, I did want to put that in on this website however it seems to have slipped my mind when I was working on this, I will have it added when I start working up the entire thing. I'm intending to use it like I'm going to use the profile picture menus. When you click on a user's display image a menu will come up and ask you what you want to do, Go to Profile, Send Message, Donate, Collaborate, ect.

The showcase area is something that SK and I were working on before RG got taken down. It was basically another area for people to display their submissions, only in that area anybody could feature a submission, it didn't need to be added by an admin. The user would pay for the submission to be displayed there for a certain period of time to try and increase it's views. The Featured Submissions would remain chosen by an admin or someone who would take care of it.

Yes, the shout outs will have a line and character limit, kind of like the forum signatures did on the older RetroGade before it's taking down.

I kind of like the idea of a recent activity on the front page, it shows people who just stumbled upon the site some of the activity that it has. However, I can take Charlotte's idea and we could probably cut it down to about 5 entries there instead of the 10 I have displaying now. A Top Users thing is going to be on the front page on the right column, but since it's on the right it won't be as dominant as the Forum Posts area.

I figured we might as well put in little things like those hide links since we don't need to worry about the size of the layout and both me and SK can work out some nice Scriptalous magic with them.

Thanks very much for the ideas and help, if you have any more let me know here since I'm checking this often for those things.

Also, if you come across any neat features on some websites you want to see added, let me know and I'll see if I can work them out to be used on RetroGade.

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Ohh, and something else I think you'll like, I'm going to just change the reviews into a comments type thing like DA has here.

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Yes, I agree that the first part of the layout is a fairly big consumer of space, however I didn't think that it would be that big of an issue for many people since they always block adds and that would give them about 100 less pixels to deal will. I liked the way it was big and spread out, it, to me, gives it the feel that it's a big professional site and because of that things don't need to be jammed into a small area. But yes, I can certain look at a few things to try and get that area bit more compressed, probably making that black area smaller, and doing something with the search box. Do you have any suggestions on what might help it out?

I do like the links as text, however for a different reason than you, I like them because since they are going to be displayed on every page it'll be a great amount of bandwidth saved instead of loading an image. However, I can do some CSS tricks on those few links you want emphasized to make them stand out more and maybe please BN as far as making them appear a little more like a button.

The search box being located in the login area was actually where I had originally placed it. However it left me wondering where the hell the login area would go, and both me and SK wanted an integrated login on the front page instead of in a pop-up. I can certainly put the search box back in that area, which would decrease the biggness of that top area quite a bit, but like I said that leaves the login area to be placed somewhere.

Perhaps, if you think it would look fine, we could place a little log in button somewhere on that top area to the right of the new location of the search box. Then when you click on that button a little log in area slides down right underneath the "Register Now!" area, but still behind the search box so that is always on top, and you can enter your user name and password there. Then when you smack enter it logs you in and then slides back up out of view. But then where would I put the links in over to go to your user panel or log out? My God, the problems.

Yeah, I can certainly get those posts and comments are running just a bit out of control, and I think it is a bit too much after looking at it for a while. Cutting it down to 5 would still give it the same effect I was looking for but at a much more controlled look.

The preview is a windows machine but will will display almost exactly the same across machines, browsers, and OS. It is completely CSS and XHTML valid following the W3C rules and guidelines so that should ensure it won't be changed. However I am going to check it today at work on a mac and make any changes that might need to be done to keep things working fluidly and keep everything presentable. I hope that text rendering won't be an issue because I chose the big fonts and the styles of those fonts specifically because of their universal availability and the way they render in almost all machines.

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Whoa, you favorited this. Thanks.

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Anyhow, after thinking about what features I'd like to see, I came up with some:

The icon system DA has is neat. As in, :thumb75416353: , instead of [link] .

I like the little trophies and award you can get for submissions on newgrounds, like " Daily Feature – 01/21/2008", or " Review Crew Pick – 01/23/2008", etc.

Lastly, I'm not sure how plausible it is, but I was thinking that it would be really neat to have an iScribble ([link]) like application on an art site. It would be awesome to have a constant on going iScribble on a space above the portal itself. Just using NG as an example portal, I came up with this: [link] . If it would be too bandwidth consuming, you could put it in a different section of the site.

Er, the thumb thing doesn't work in comment sections apparently, but you can see it used here: [link]

I like the idea you had for the thumbs, so instead of a link being displayed in the forums or comments it displays a thumbnail of the submission. I'm sure that wouldn't be too hard to work out, although I'm not quite sure how we could work that out with the Literature submissions.

I'm already working on having awards for getting a special achievement just like what DA and NG has. However, what I was thinking was using ribbons and things like the following
[link]
[link]
[link]

The scribble thing is very neat however I'm not really sure on how it could be done. I would think it'd have to be something done in Flash or a Java applications. Java apps are pretty disgusting as far as workable on the web and they normally have a longer than average load time, for me anyway. I'm not skilled in Flash at all so I don't think I'd be able to make anything like that.

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