Deciding on the look of Thrive's GUI, forum, and website

We need to decide on the look of Thrive's GUI, the forum, and the website. Do we want it to be:

• Dark, spacey, and contrasting
  
• Light, vibrant, and living
  
• Or a compromise?
  

I prefer white on black.

Personally, I think the microbe stage should have darker shades of blue, but have a slightly sterile or clinical look.

Discussing our personal preferences towards the GUI won't get us very far. A more effective approach is to wait until we have a set of artists who can draft up concepts for different ideas for the GUI, so that we can pick one that we like and revise if necessary.

@NickTheNick: Oliveriver and I have created quite a few concepts over at the GUI thread. If someone could provide a plain white uncoloured PNG of the approved layout, we could work from there. Each producing comparable concepts that would require minimal to no code changes to switch between.

On the subject of the forum, I for one think it really needs a facelift. It takes a full 7 seconds to load on my laptop and about 5 on my tablet. In other terms, it is slow an inefficient. Although I'm not sure anything in our power can be done to improve it, I have made a list anyway:

>Less emoticons-They clutter up the 'post a reply' page. (Maybe some custom made more Thrive-esquite ones instead of the standard 4 frame animated yellow circles.
>Posting a reply stays on the thread page-I have an image example for this:                            

Spoiler:

>Limiting the amount of elements in the sidebar-It really is overcrowded
>After posting, it takes you directly back to the thread, instead of bringing up a confirmation window

Here are some changes that won't necessarily improve performance:

>A redesign to fit the finished GUI
>BBcode elements are displayed in the OP when written as they do in the thread-Not sure how hard this would be to implement
>Show which team a registered forum member is in under their picture and on their profile page

The main reason I made this thread was to say that the forum needs updating, but that's not the most important thing right now. [/thread]

you might wanna keep everything clean, the less the letters the better