Chess community! I’m Chloe, the designer at Stack Exchange who’s working on the upcoming Chess site theme for you. I reviewed your responses to my initial post, and below you'll find the site design I came up with, based on your ideas and input.
Your site design
We want to give you your own theme that reflects your topic, culture, and community. This will help brand your site as unique, even while you share common elements with other sites that show you are part of a bigger Stack Exchange family.
Color scheme
Creating the logo and color scheme was a little tricky, as I wanted them to feel different than the large chess websites. In the initial information gathering post, one of you suggested using a color scheme of light and dark brown, taken from many wooden chess boards. Here’s where we ended up:
The darkest brown is used as the primary color in the logo and for the site buttons, and the lighter browns are used for background elements.
Logo
I wanted to create a simple, recognizable banner for you all that works at small sizes and doesn't mimic any existing chess sites. I went with a stylized illustration of a queen and used the font Garamond, which feels classical and is reminiscent of the typography used in a newspaper chess puzzle:
The favicons would then look like this:
Page designs
Putting it all together, here’s what we get for the main site:
And following the tradition of our meta sites being a grayscale version of the main site, these are the designs I created. The subtle change in the background is also inspired by newspaper chess puzzles:
Thoughts?
We hope you enjoy this design, but if something doesn’t feel right, now is your chance to share your feedback. This window for feedback will be open for one week. We will then work to incorporate feedback as best as we can, finalize things on our end, and lastly, deliver the design to your site.
