June 14th, 2018 at 4:42 AM
Some more detailed commentary on the mockups that @harry K. submitted. I finally had a chance to really dig in a little deeper! But d***, these do look very good. 
I really like the movement of the announcement up to the header/toolbar area. I think it's a great use of some space that seems like "dead space" of sorts currently. The search box looks flatter and more modern, and I like the use of an avatar and a simple drop down for the user at the right side of the toolbar. It's really creative. A lot of the little tweaks look really great.
Regarding the boards, it actually looks fresh with fewer rounded corners. The MS design didn't use rounded corners for a very long time, until this past update. I have good templates for a good sidebox design that would fit pretty well too.
I've noticed that these mockups are container-less and 100% width. It looks a little more "readable" and upfront without the container over the background. I was thinking about, for the future, having the site's background be photography submissions from members here that are alternating every week. I think we might be able to pull that off more easily with flatter designs, so I like the look for a future ideal of what our design could be. We'll see if backgrounds really fit with the new design and go from there.
My only real concern doing another mini-redesign here is that MyBB 1.9 is in the works. Even the change from 1.6 to 1.8 required a complete, from the ground up, redo of the theme. (Simlink and I made it to be fairly similar. We developed it on the 1.8 beta so we were ready when it released. ) 1.9 is definitely going to require a ground-up theme, so I was contemplating waiting until 1.9 for some of the bigger investments in the theme. On the downside, it might be a year or more before 1.9 is released, so it would be a delay for responsiveness.
I really like the movement of the announcement up to the header/toolbar area. I think it's a great use of some space that seems like "dead space" of sorts currently. The search box looks flatter and more modern, and I like the use of an avatar and a simple drop down for the user at the right side of the toolbar. It's really creative. A lot of the little tweaks look really great.
Regarding the boards, it actually looks fresh with fewer rounded corners. The MS design didn't use rounded corners for a very long time, until this past update. I have good templates for a good sidebox design that would fit pretty well too.
I've noticed that these mockups are container-less and 100% width. It looks a little more "readable" and upfront without the container over the background. I was thinking about, for the future, having the site's background be photography submissions from members here that are alternating every week. I think we might be able to pull that off more easily with flatter designs, so I like the look for a future ideal of what our design could be. We'll see if backgrounds really fit with the new design and go from there.
My only real concern doing another mini-redesign here is that MyBB 1.9 is in the works. Even the change from 1.6 to 1.8 required a complete, from the ground up, redo of the theme. (Simlink and I made it to be fairly similar. We developed it on the 1.8 beta so we were ready when it released.
) 1.9 is definitely going to require a ground-up theme, so I was contemplating waiting until 1.9 for some of the bigger investments in the theme. On the downside, it might be a year or more before 1.9 is released, so it would be a delay for responsiveness.
