Let me give a little background on the title name first. It’s a play on the wonderful PBS show “This Old House” where TV greats like Norm Abram (badass carpenter) take an old house and fix it up. I just wanted some kind of home-improvement themed blog title…okay?!?!?!

Anyway, this new feature is aimed at providing feedback and comments on user submitted UIs. These UIs aren’t highlight ready, and I don’t want to treat them like a normal highlight; rather, I plan on giving some helpful tips via screenshot commentary and the blog post itself. Most of the comments on the screenshot are slight cosmetic changes, and this first UI didn’t require many of them. The bulk of the post will be dedicated to larger problems I find in the UI, and how to remedy them.

So, the first UI I’ll be doing is Sichosis’ UI, which he emailed to me.

Screenshot (Link pops to commented SS)

Placement/Sizing

Generally I think the placement of elements in this UI is fine. The unit frames are highly visible, but their size and opacity could be problematic if you have to look for smaller environmental elements. I can’t really think of an example, but the potential exists.

The bottom panel and minimap are also fine in their placement, but the size of both of those frames coupled with completely opaque backgrounds is a bit troublesome. As I’ve pointed out before, you want to be able to see as much space as possible and large blocks of opaque color don’t really help that at all. Making all of those panels at least 50% transparent would alleviate the problem a and still preserve the appearance.

The FuBar bar underneath the action bars as well as the stats under the minimap seem sort of superfluous to me. All of that information can easily be accessed via a hiding FuBar panel, and absolutely none of it needs to be on the screen at all times. That would reduce the “cluttered” feel of this UI a lot, and would keep the whole thing more streamlined.

Colors/Aesthetics

The “all black” nature of the UI is a little overwhelming, but reducing opacity would help clear that up a little. Overall the UI follows the standard Catih aesthetic in terms of borders, and the borders look great overall. The bright, bold unit frame colors draw the eye’s attention very easily, which is a nice feature.

Having 3 fonts visible on screen is a bit much, especially when they are nothing alike. Reducing the number of fonts keeps the UI feeling a lot more cohesive and is considerably less distracting. You want to reserve unique fonts for extremely important things that draw your eye – i.e. buff announcements in scrolling combat text. Similarly, some of the pixel fonts are not sized correctly.

In the end, this UI is *close* but it’s missing the polish of something ready to be released for download. Keep working on it!