I have finished the toying I was doing with RCM's new look. I am still not 100% this is how it will continue looking, but anything is better than how it had looked. I had originally been designing it with a more sleek look, but then decided that a simpler, brighter look would probably fit it more. So instead of gradients and lines you get flat and rounded corners. The main goal on the redesign was shooting for a consistency of look, nothing moves or jumps, and all the controls are always in the same place. This is going to be increasingly more important as more features get added. Browser consistency is also a biggie on my list, and so far I am rendering the same across the big three in Windows. I really need a Mac around to scope it out there, and I reboot to linux to see how it looks there after this post.
I am using more images to display the page, but the page should still weigh in at less than 20-25k with about half of that being layout. A couple more will probably be added with time, but I still have the 25k limit in mind. I want this to be a design that lends itself well to flipping back and forth without the wait you get from a lot of large images. Speaking of images, I got to play with a CSS hack to add rounded edges to the tiles. Basically, I used the comic tiles are set as backgrounds to <div>'s that are 200px X 200px (the size of the tiles) and then a transparent image with the corners colored white is put in them. It only works because the tiles are always the same size, but I think it adds a lot.
I dropped the View page. I had not been intending to keep it anyways. It was more of bandwidth test to see if I needed to trim the images down...which is why I did that last week. I also, for the moment, dropped the user search. It will come back in another way soon enough. Oh well, let me know what you think
