Admin Forum:Any tips for beautifying your wiki?

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We can all agree that when you are starting a brand new wiki, they look pretty bare. Sure, you can choose a nifty color scheme but let's be honest, most popular wikis have at least customized wordmark and background image. While adding content takes time and patience, how do you transform the look of a wiki? Can you give someone who has barely any skills in Photoshop, image manipulation, or CSS some helpful tips or tricks?

What's the best way to go about sprucing up a new wiki? ----Trellar (help forum | blog) 01:40, November 29, 2011 (UTC)

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The most basic thing to remember when beautifying a wiki is to know about the subject. Try to research about the subject of your wiki, and base the color choices and other stuff to add from what you find.

This is much easier to grasp if you're working on a wiki based on a show or an already existing media like Pirates of the Carribean or Avatar the Last Airbender. You can just visit the official site and get some ideas from there, or invent a theme based on the feel of the subject. (TIP: Most horror-themed wikis look more appropriate with a dark-colored theme.)

However, if you're tackling with a wiki that talks about a more general topic, like Italian restaurants, for example, here is when you need to exert some effort in gathering ideas. Google is your friend in this; do an image search for "italian restaurants", and you'll notice that most of the restaurants have a dominant earth color in the interior. You just discovered yourself a color theme that you can use for the wiki!

Now, if you're struggling with the artistic bits of a wiki, don't be afraid to ask the Content Team or the Logo Creation Wiki. heraldofmeridian♣ 02:34, November 29, 2011 (UTC)

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Warning -- I'm bad with graphical content... but I've had to do some image modification lately -- ForestMonthZero

Well... for people who do not have access to Photoshop, some tips might be, what free tools are available to create graphical content?

• GIMP -- a free image workshop package that works like Photoshop
• ImageMagick -- a free command-line tool for image manipulation (useful for declaring a colour transparent)
• Paint.NET -- a free image editor/creator, much more useful than the one that ships with Windows (MS Paint)
• IrfanView -- a free image viewer, which can be used to create panorama images, resize images, sharpen, flatten, flip, and some other basic image manipulations

ForestMonthZero 08:40, November 29, 2011 (UTC)

Disclaimer -- I am not associated with any of the tools I've listed -- ForestMonthZero

If I were still using DOS... I'd probably still be using the shareware version of Paint Shop Pro, giftrans for gif transparency and using shareware CompuShow for viewing the results. ForestMonthZero 08:49, November 29, 2011 (UTC)

If I were on Linux, I'd be using GIMP, and ImageMagick, and xv . ForestMonthZero 08:49, November 29, 2011 (UTC)