Graphics & Design / Theme & Layout -- Rating: Good

Your forum's home page looks sleek and snazzy -- there are some grammatical errors, but this review is about your theme and thus I won't go so far as to proofread your site. I think the homepage provides a good introduction to the forums.

The first thing I noticed when I entered your forum were the various shades of blue you used. Now, I like blue, and the way you use it, with a tint of gray, is fine in and of itself; only, with dark blue in the background, a darker blue for forum headers, a pale blue for the menu, and other blues and grays elsewhere, it gives off a tiny bit of a cluttered feel. Not to say that your forum looks bad; it just doesn't look sleek, if you get my meaning. That said, the gradients give the main forum a pleasing edge. I think you've done a good job of grouping similar forums under categories; the layout doesn't look very intimidating, at least to my eye. Props for that.

In contrast, the logo isn't much more than plain text above a background. At the least you should change your forum logo to a darker color that better stands out from the gray background, or place a black border around the text. I'm sure you could "jazz up" the logo in the same way you jazzed up the rest of the forum. The spotted background behind the logo could work if you added the same texture to some other images throughout the forum: Consistency without monotony is key in designing forums.

I like the menu. Adding a rollover effect was a simple yet elegant touch. The icons look somewhat generic in my humble opinion; you may want to change them. The forum header images and post icons look very nice and fit together (the only exception being their colors, which I addressed in the first paragraph of this review).


Moving on to the post designs, I'm rather indifferent about them. The black gradient border around the profile area seems rather unnecessary, and the thick border to the left seems empty. The profile box's rollover effect looks nice, but again I think the black gradient border could be changed to something more appealing. I do like the image above the posts, behind "Message [Page 1 of 1]". There's a red bar below the posts that doesn't fit with the blue theme -- it could look nice, but right now it's just there. If there is something that is supposed to be there, perhaps I can't view it as a guest. One last critique on the post area: The gray text, just like the gray logo, could be darkened so it stands out more.

In general, your forum's theme has a lot of potential. I do believe the wide-ranging color scheme hurts it somewhat, as do the non-contrasting logo and the odd profile backgrounds, but those could be fixed easily. Keep working on it and don't be averse to tweaking.