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The ORG Network is a highly respected collection of sites dedicated to games produced by Blizzard Entertainment and Flagship Studios, including the popular franchises StarCraft, WarCraft, Diablo, and Hellgate: London. For several years, the ORG Network shared a discussion forum with its sister sites, the Legacy Network, but during the fall of 2003, there was a major split between the two factions and the ORG staff decided to start anew with a fresh discussion forum which they called Warboards. I undertook the project of designing the graphical layout of the forum, given almost free reign to make it into whatever I chose, as long as the design was elegant and themed towards the gaming industry. The forum was to be in vBulletin, a popular discussion board software made by Jelsoft Enterprises, which had its own templating system that I was initially unfamiliar with. I had experience making themes for phpBB, another forum software, but vBulletin was significantly different than what I was used to.

During the course of several months, I familiarized myself with the vBulletin templating system, and created a theme that had a distinct style from many of the gaming sites online at the time. Whereas most gaming sites went for a dark, rusted look similar to that implemented in games such as Starcraft, in order to place Warboards in its own league as the creators envisioned, I created a theme with a more clean, modern look utilizing a lighter color scheme instead. I also used smooth edges and subtle gradients to create a very streamlined interface, deeply ingraining the distinctiveness of the theme into every aspect of my design. The site design was a bold move, but was praised almost unanimously upon implementation, and still survives to this day: over half a million posts and fifty thousand users later, the design still remains almost exactly like how it was originally created.

Estimated completion time: 150 hours
You may visit the site at http://www.warboards.org.