April fool's : BGA logo : back to basics
Posted: 01 April 2017, 07:45
UPDATE : April fool's! Of course it was a joke, except one thing: we care about YOU, who used to like this website despite its weakness and "not so good looking" stuff. But to make this service sustainable and even larger, we also need the audience that is NOT coming today on BGA because of these "details", so we have to care about eye candy things too. This is a challenge to satisfy all audiences, but we like this 
Last summer, we changed entirely the visual universe of Board Game Arena with a new logo and new colors.
However, for nostalgic reasons and other reasons explained below, we decided to move back and restore our previous logo & colors.
The main reason is the following : Een and I, the main facilitators of this service, are both engineers, with an artistic sensibility close to zero. Making "good looking" stuff, "nice" colors, "visual harmony", all these things, well ... this is not really our cup of tea.
When we started this website, we went straight to the important point : efficiency. Need an additional statistics ? Here we go : push this button a little bit to the left, push this other element a little bit to the right, and put the new stat in the middle. Need a new advanced option? No problem at all, we add it and add it two others by the way. So yes, at the end the results looks like the Space Shuttle cockpit, but after all, we are board games players and we like to give ourselves headaches !
So yes, they may have good reasons to make this website more "accessible", to have a "wider audience", but to be honest : we only care about YOU, who is already there and who is there and have been always there. You don't care about "raw" interfaces, you are not afraid about juggling with tons of options. And by the way, we are close to 800.000 registered users on BGA, this is good enough !
In consequence, in the near future we will revert some changes from last years. What you can expect is to see everywhere more buttons, more options, more indicators ... and you won't need to click to make them appear. On mobile, to make things clear you'll just have to zoom a little (at 800% everything is pretty clear). So yes the website may be a little bit more complex than today, but we are now writing a very simple PDF with a dozen of pages to explain how all of this will work. Like a BGA game rules. Simple and efficient.
Of course, the new-old logo symbolize this first step of this direction change. In the following weeks you'll see other changes, and we hope that this will allow you to go further with BGA, for the love of board games, only board games, without eye-candy stuff - after all, why not play in text mode?
The team.
Last summer, we changed entirely the visual universe of Board Game Arena with a new logo and new colors.
However, for nostalgic reasons and other reasons explained below, we decided to move back and restore our previous logo & colors.
The main reason is the following : Een and I, the main facilitators of this service, are both engineers, with an artistic sensibility close to zero. Making "good looking" stuff, "nice" colors, "visual harmony", all these things, well ... this is not really our cup of tea.
When we started this website, we went straight to the important point : efficiency. Need an additional statistics ? Here we go : push this button a little bit to the left, push this other element a little bit to the right, and put the new stat in the middle. Need a new advanced option? No problem at all, we add it and add it two others by the way. So yes, at the end the results looks like the Space Shuttle cockpit, but after all, we are board games players and we like to give ourselves headaches !
So yes, they may have good reasons to make this website more "accessible", to have a "wider audience", but to be honest : we only care about YOU, who is already there and who is there and have been always there. You don't care about "raw" interfaces, you are not afraid about juggling with tons of options. And by the way, we are close to 800.000 registered users on BGA, this is good enough
!In consequence, in the near future we will revert some changes from last years. What you can expect is to see everywhere more buttons, more options, more indicators ... and you won't need to click to make them appear. On mobile, to make things clear you'll just have to zoom a little (at 800% everything is pretty clear). So yes the website may be a little bit more complex than today, but we are now writing a very simple PDF with a dozen of pages to explain how all of this will work. Like a BGA game rules. Simple and efficient.
Of course, the new-old logo symbolize this first step of this direction change. In the following weeks you'll see other changes, and we hope that this will allow you to go further with BGA, for the love of board games, only board games, without eye-candy stuff - after all, why not play in text mode?
The team.
that said, bring on the changes 
